Voter Fraud and Internet Popularity in 140 Characters or Less
The Shorty Awards is a contest to select the best of Twitter in certain topics... by encouraging folks to tweet (or post their votes via Twitter) their votes, where the top five will go on to judging. Yeah, you can tell this will end well. One of the awards is for Health (or #health -- the hashtags on Twitter let you search for certain topics).

Anyway, this seems to be shaping up into a wankstorm. Not really because of the health issues themselves, though that plays a part, but mostly the standard of 'cheating, vote solicitation, and conspiracies'. The nominal issue is whether the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) or the Alternative Medicine (alt-med) should take the Shorty, but... well, it stops being about the medicine and more about which side wins.

The Cast
Science-Based Medicine/Skeptic Movement
Dr. Rachael Dunlop/@DrRachie -- Skeptical podcaster and heart-disease researcher on Twitter.
Orac -- Cancer surgeon, vaccination advocate, and medical blogger.
PZ Myers -- Skeptic, atheist and biologist, known for 'pharyngulizing' internet polls, which basically means posting links to informal internet polls on religion, science and so on, with the intent that his readers will push them in unexpected directions.
Tim Farley -- Vaccine advocate and blog commenter.

Alternative Medicine
Joseph Mercola/@mercola -- Osteopath and webmaster of a natural health site.
Mike Adams/@HealthRanger -- Webmaster of NaturalNews.com, an alt-med news site with a bit of a reputation for conspiracy-mongering.

Going to apologize - I follow Orac's blog, so most of my commentary is from there.


Anyway, so the Shorty Awards are humming along, with HealthRanger/Adams in first place, DrRachie in second, and Mercola in third. The skeptical/SBM blogosphere gets a hold of things, and advocates voting for DrRachie, since she seems to be the best candidate to overtake Adams. Especially since Adams is rather disliked in the skeptical blogosphere, as this quote from Orac shows:

At the time of my writing this, it's that über-quack of quacks, that despicable ghoul for whom there is no such thing as sinking too low in the service of promoting quackery, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com.

Anyway, so the word spreads out to vote for DrRachie, and to give silly informal nominations to people you don't like. Adams and Mercola continue to advocate for voting for themselves -- pretty much business as usual for these things.

Then folks start noticing some foul play. Commenter #17 on Orac's blog post, Tim Farley, notices something fishy. Since linking to comment threads on scienceblogs is a pain in the ass, I reproduce it here.

All of the voting in this contest is on Twitter and therefore public, of course, so some of us have been digging into the votes that Mike Adams has been getting. We've found a large number of accounts like this:

[list of six twitter accounts]

...where clearly the ONLY purpose for that Twitter account is to vote for Mike Adams. I estimate that 10% to 20% of his vote total consists of accounts like this.

Fortunately there are (quite reasonably) rules against this. I encourage people to write to info@shortyawards.com and point out that they should remove these votes from the total before the nominations are over.

The good news is the votes aren't the only thing that determines the winner. There's a panel of judges too. But if he doesn't win, I predict Mike Adams will accuse the awards committee of collusion with Big Pharma to suppress his votes.

The awards insist that all votes be from active accounts created before the date of votes started, so using votes like this doesn't count. On the other hand, it will mean some poor smuck at the Shorty Awards has to go through and screen out these things.

Anyway, the Shorty Awards judges investigate, and Adams/HealthRanger is disqualified. And, well, it's apparently all a conspiracy by the vaccine and pharmaceutical industry, and that he and his readers are totally innocent.

It wasn't really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.

And, also the Shorty Awards are also at fault:

In investigating this issue, I also learned that the Shorty Awards actually encourages defamatory attacks, slanderous accusations and profanity as part of their voting process. They do this by ignoring their responsibility to police and remove such unprofessional behavior on the part of candidates and voters. The vaccine-pushing candidate now "winning" the Shorty Awards in the health category has text on her website that says, "If water has memory, then homeopathy is full of shit."

But, really, See How Loudly I Don't Care?

In the end, I suppose winning a Shorty Award wasn't really such a big deal. We don't need recognition from some tiny website to legitimize our existence on the 'net. But seeing how the Shorty Awards engages in outright vote fraud while rigging the awards just goes to prove, once again, how supporters of pharmaceutical medicine lie and cheat their way into getting what they want -- ethics be damned!

Of course, that doesn't stop him from telling his readers to vote for Mercola. Or his readers from giving DrRachie nominations like:

"I nominate DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because... She;s part of a scam"
"...because she represents Big Phrama and shows how corrupt it is"
"..because she is the puppet who you want to win instead of Mike Adams."

Which she was kind enough to include in the comments of Orac's second post, gloating about this and mocking Adams.

I swear, this is sometimes why I read Orac's blog -- some of the people who are opposed to him are just over the top wanky. (Sometime I'll dig up the story of a Age of Autism blogger photoshoping Paul Offit eating a baby for Thanksgiving.)