20 million sock puppets against separatism

混球vCNN from the USA votes often

Sina, a major Chinese web portal that’s been running with the anger that many Internet users feel toward CNN and the western media, is hosting a signature campaign that asks Chinese round the globe to sign on against CNN and separatism.

As with other online polls, this petition is open for abuse, particularly given its explicit goal of racking up 20 million signatures.

Blogger Wen Yunchao took a look through the results and found some interesting names on the list.

At right is a screenful of signatures from individuals named “混球vCNN” who posted from the US. Another screenshot shows the same name posting multiple times from Iraq.

Other fake signatures are less obvious:

Screenshots 3, 4, and 5 are of signatures from 3:00-6:00 on 16 April (pages 8,500-10,000 at 0:15 on the 25th). Here we can see that the names are all different, but the province is almost entirely Yunnan. During those hours, vanishingly few people from other provinces and cities signed their names.

From the changing “names,” we notice that the name Genghis (成吉, Chengji in Chinese) occurs frequently (as in Genghis Kehong, Genghis Xingshuang), as does the character 爽 (in Mingshuang, Xingshuang, Jiashuang). Evidently, a whole slew of surnames and given names were entered, and then the computer randomly selected a full name. What’s interesting is that the two character surname Chengji, which you usually don’t see, suddenly turns up on Sina. Did the editor imagine that Genghis Khan’s surname was Chengji? If you entered all the names into a computer list, you’d probably come up with some pretty interesting things.

From these screenshots we can see that there’s a possibility of ballot-stuffing on Sina. If Sina takes this data as a “signed protest against the western media,” then it’s only going to turn itself into a laughingstock.

Of course, Sina could say that that this was done by netizens maliciously using automatic voting programs, but in that case, as China’s Biggest News Portal, how will it explain to its clients and users why it was not prepared to prevent ballot stuffing in a serious signature-gathering event that has implications for the nation’s reputation?