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  • 2020-02-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Trolls Try to Clog Phone Lines After Iowa Caucuses? (en)
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  • The 2020 Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020, didn't go quite as smoothly as organizers had hoped. Issues with a new app-based reporting system led to delays and confusion about the final results. To make matters worse, organizers had to deal with an influx of prank calls from internet trolls. NBC News reported: Shortly after the caucuses ended on Feb. 3, and just as news started to break that there were problems with the final results, messages started to appear on the internet forum 4chan urging people to call the number for Iowa caucuses reporting and clog the lines: The exact intent of these calls varied from one person to the next. Some of the posts on 4chan stated that they were trying to tie up the lines in order to further delay the results. One person wrote: Others suggested that they should report fake results. One user thought it would be funny to report 1,488 votes for Andrew Yang (the number 1488 is the combination of two white supremacist symbols: 14 is short hand for the 14-word slogan and 88 stands for Heil Hitler, or the eighth letter of the English alphabet). Others seemed to be solely interested in causing chaos. For instance, at least two people claimed that they called the hotline and then called the person who answered the phone a racial slur. While it's not possible to definitively determine the political affiliations of those involved with this stunt (users on 4chan are anonymous), it's clear that most had an anti-Democrat agenda. Mandy McClure, the communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party, said that the group experienced an an unusually high volume of calls and that some of the callers appeared to be supporters of President Trump. Bloomberg reported: While supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump may have been involved in this prank, no evidence exists that this act of sabotage was directed by the Trump campaign. Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for the Trump campain, told Bloomberg: As both Murtaugh and the Iowa Democratic Party noted, these calls weren't the sole problem with the Iowa caucuses, and no evidence exists that these calls impacted the final results. Rather, it appears the calls were more of a nuisance and may have contributed to a longer delay in the final vote count. Here are a few other messages we found on 4chan promoting this prank. (en)
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