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Kim Jong Un is Time readers' Person of the Year

With a lot of help from 4Chan, Time readers named North Korea's Kim Jong Un Person of the Year.
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UPI/Stephen Shaver
UPI/Stephen Shaver 
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Published: Dec. 13, 2012 at 12:07 PM
By KATE STANTON, UPI.com

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is the people's choice for Time magazine's Person of the Year. With 5.6 million votes, the Onion's "Sexist Man Alive" beat out Jon Stewart, Undocumented Immigrants, Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Ai Weiwei and the Mars Rover.

Kim is the reader's choice, but that doesn't mean he'll land Time's Person of the Year cover. That decision ultimately stands with the magazine's editors.

“While we don’t make our selection based on the poll results,” Time's executive editor Radhika Jones said in a recent Q&A, “it’s always interesting to see where some of our preferred candidates end up.”

Time even gave a shout out to the always enterprising 4Chan users who managed to manipulate the Time poll for the second time in three years.

However, some of the highest vote tallies got a boost from members of Internet forums like 4Chan who launched a campaign to manipulate the results pushing North Korea’s supreme leader to the top of the list.

4Chan users also organized the list results so that the first letters of each name spell out "KJU GAS CHAMBERS," a reference to the reported brutality of North Korean prison camps.


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