Pet of the Week: Who Let the Bots Out
What started off as a fun, light-hearted poll on the ACC Chronicle this May quickly transformed into something nobody expected: a rigged, competitive voting scandal, where everyone begged and cheated for votes.
Pet of the Week, launched originally as Pet of the Month by Larry Rendero, is a feature adapted by Erin Chen. Students and staff can submit their pets to the harsh truths of the polls to pick a fan favorite, but is truth the right word?
After the launch of Pet of the Week: Dog Edition, the votes started climbing. 100, then 1,000, then over 3,000 votes. One pet eventually hit nearly 21,000 votes on the third installment: Pet of the Week: Rodent Edition.
In a school of 584 students, that number doesn’t make sense. After some investigation, I learned that students were begging friends for votes, voting multiple times, and at least one student built bots to do the clicking for them. What was a cute pet poll had become a full-on competition, and no one chose to play it fair.
Should people feel bad about it, about cheating? That depends on who you ask. Ms. McFarlane, the staff sponsor, says she’s mostly amused that students would devote that much energy to hacking a school newspaper poll.
Lan-Madeleine Do doesn’t see much harm in it either. “They’re not gaining anything. They’re not gonna get a prize, they’re not gonna get money, it’s literally just a vote.”
Meanwhile, Griffin, a student who wasn’t closely following Pet of the Week before all this, called it more petty than criminal. “I don’t care if you ask your friends to vote, but 21,000 votes? Come on.”
Erin Chen thinks people should feel bad. “You ruin it for everybody else. Like somebody submitted their pet, their owner didn’t cheat, but you did, so you’re not the rightful winner.”
Vivien McGinn, who entered her rats and lost, agrees. “I didn’t expect them to win, but I was hoping it would be fair. And that didn’t happen.”
Darin Bell had the strongest opinion: “I grew up in a world that supported truthfulness. Pet of the Week is just another example of people lying to me.”
Everyone has different opinions on the topic, so the real question is, should cheating be cut down or capitalized on?
Ms. McFarlane plans to reach out to the Chronicle’s publishing platform to explore whether vote limits are even possible. Darin Bell had an idea on how to capitalize on the attention.
“The brand of Pet of the Week is cheating,” they said, so let people vote more than once, but only if they solve a puzzle first; make it a prize for a challenge that benefits the viewership of the Chronicle.
In the meantime, while the direction for the feature gets ironed out, new editions will keep rolling out: possibly a bird edition, dead pet edition, reruns of past editions with new selections, and possibly branching it out from pet of the week to anything of the week.
A feature with a simplistic and cute feature quickly became the most talked about and controversial thing on the Chronicle. Pets won thousands of votes, but people won via cheating, and a simple poll became a debate about fairness and ethics. So before you vote, ask yourself if it’s you voting or your friend’s voice in your ear.
The Winners:
In the spring session of Pet of the Week, three pets took the title of first place in their category! These winners are Pookie with 3115 votes, GK with 181 votes, and Truffle with an astonishing 20,695 votes!
Truffle – Syrian hamster
Truffle is a master escape artist with a stomach bigger than her body. Every night she enjoys climbing out of her cage to wander around looking for more food, as if she hasn’t just eaten. She loves food, and will even give your finger a little nimble if you’re not careful. She’s very strong and will flex on you by doing pull ups on the top of her cage. To keep up her teeth as strong as her arms she’ll chew on anything in sight, including paper towel rolls and the corner of bathmats.
GK – Domestic Longhair
While my cat is no longer with us, she did have a very lovable and empty gaze. She lived to be 20 years old, outliving her sister of 16 years, despite all this she still managed to have zero brain in her head.
Pookie – Shih Tzu
Pookie is a cutie patootie that is floofy and cute. He’s a little stupid, but that’s okay. He has a twin brother named Brownie, and they like playing together. He has the biggest boba eyes ever. He’s so friendly that he’ll walk up to all strangers with a tail wag. If there was a robber, he would run up to them and play.
Pet of the week this spring season was climactic! As a staff reporter and the new owner of Pet of the Week, I did not expect the voting to get so competitive. Personally, despite all the drama and the cheating, I think that the POTW series was a great way to boost interactivity to the Chronicle! While the POTW polls are not over yet, I think that moving forward, we should set our pride aside and let votes flow naturally. Remember, Pet of the Week is to have fun!
