Why does oprah hate disabled people

Yep, Dr. Phyllis went down nearly votes. We may never find out who rigged the contest but the moral is clear: you should never try to pull one over on Internet geeks…by using the Internet.

Really fascinating stuff. Have a tip or story idea? Email us. Or to keep it anonymous, click here. By Jon Bershad Jun 24th, , pm. Twitter share button. Filed Under:. Previous Post Next Post. Then for every vote that Anner received, another one of the top contestants would immediately receive two. Oprah's people denied allegations of rigging. But it wasn't until the "final five" was announced that the blogosphere went bonkers. Screen shots showed that Anner's vote count had been altered, moving him from first place with more than 9 million votes to seventh with fewer than 3.

In that same space of time, another contestant, Jacqueline Wattimo — a cheesy, saccharine "hockey mom"-type who talks about "inspiration" and "positive thinking" — had suddenly gained more than 2 million votes, putting her in the lead. Once again Oprah's people denied allegations of rigging, claiming that "a third party vetted the online votes before the final results were announced".

But the story does not end there. Critics began to claim that Anner's supporters had been the ones to rig the vote. Supposedly an anonymous email had been sent to Geekosystem a geek culture blog by a user of another online forum, who admitted to having employed a computer script to improperly increase the votes for Anner. But even if this were the case, it would not explain the other voting irregularities and the sudden spike in Wattimo's vote count.

The potential for media producers to discriminate against people with disabilities is one issue. It is an important one as the chronic under-representation of people with disabilities in the media only perpetuates the social stigma and lack of community awareness and understanding.

The other issues are competition rigging from the inside and competition hijacking from the outside. Both present ethical dilemmas. On the one hand, competition rigging is grossly deceptive and, in cases where voters must pay to vote usually by sending in text messages , any tampering would legally constitute fraud. Vote rigging also reflects a rather patronising view of the public; that it cannot be trusted to decide what it really likes and what it wants. On the other side of the fence, it is also ethically questionable and potentially illegal to use computer scripts to skew online voting competitions.

While there is no hard evidence that this has happened in this case, there is certainly evidence to suggest it goes on elsewhere. Competition organisers need to take responsibility for how they run their competitions. They can easily deal with this issue by regulating the number of times a person can vote from any particular computer over a set timeframe. As for Anner, Oprah continues to maintain that there has been no rigging.

But thanks to the lobbying of two of the strongest, most active, internet communities known as 4chan and Reddit, Oprah has agreed to take the top seven online finalists — including Anner. If nothing else, this scandal shows the power of the online public to champion an unlikely — but deserving — hero. More importantly, those in the media are beginning to realise that online communities wield enormous power in exposing corporate hypocrisy and holding to account those at the helm.