The "Racist Hacking" of the NASA Competition

So this is trending lately from just about every media organization.

Three African-American young ladies entered NASA's Goddard’s Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge in which students submit projects and compete for a cash prize and a visit to a NASA facility, the winner was to be determined by a public vote. The team's project involved purifying drinking water but that's irrelevant.

The story according to the media is that "hackers" from 4chan hacked the vote against them because of their race. NASA then closed public voting.

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Instead of being celebrated for being the only all-black, female team to be named as finalists, the trio were bombarded with racist comments by anonymous online trolls on the website 4chan

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- Fox News

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But when NASA opened the contest to online voting, users from 4chan, the image-based online bulletin board, launched a campaign to hack the results, forcing NASA to shut down the voting.

A CNN analysis of 4chan/pol/ uncovered several threads urging users to vote for a team of teenage boys instead, using anonymous privacy software to hack the voting system.

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- CNN

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Hackers tried to sway a NASA challenge in order to attack grade school students based on their race, the administration confirmed.

The attempted hacking arrives at a time when more programs aim to encourage underrepresented groups such as women and minorities to become more involved in science and engineering.

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- USA Today

So that's the whole story right? NASA was "hacked" by 4chan users who did it because they just plain don't like black people. No.

What the media missed

Here is the 4chan thread, from April 29th, that started their involvement:



...and then we see who brought race in to it first...

On 23 April one of the contestants said the following on twitter LINK

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Public voting starts today and we need YOUR vote! We are the only team from the east coast & female minority group!

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It was then picked up by another user who got far more attention: LINK

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Aye y’all these 3 black girls are competing for a trip to NASA. The only black finalist. They’re currently losing.

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So some takeaways:

1. Brigading a public vote is not fricking "hacking" you dumbass "journalists". It's amazing how many times they have to make this stupid fricking mistake. If what the twitter community did wasn't hacking then what 4chan did wasn't hacking.

2. 4chan didn't bring race in to it, they answered other people that did. In typical 4chan fashion they did so with dumbassedry, edginess, slurs and all their typical shite...I'm not saying I endorse that but it wasn't one-sided and 4chan didn't start it.

3. A more accurate title for this story would be "Internet idiots play identity politics; ruin NASA competition". Both sides are to blame here.

4. Media bias is rarely a journalist saying "I don't like policy A or Politician X"...it's what we see here; robbing of context, using words incorrectly, and only telling one side of the story. They do this to drive up clicks and deepen societal divides that make them money. frick the media.

I was able to look up all of this shite in about 20 minutes plus the time to write it. I don't have a journalism degree but this is a more complete perspective than anything pushed by the media and you see this every day in forums and other places around the internet. WTF is going on with journalism? It is literal trash. You cannot trust a word these people utter or write, it could be as simple as a fire in a particular area of your small town, the media will probably frick it up.