Bulletins

4Chan 4Channed the Iowa Caucus.

Issie Lapowsky
February 6, 2020

Trolls posted the Iowa Democratic Party's phone number on the fringe message board, urging each other to "clog the lines" and prevent Iowans from reporting results.

  • This may help explain why precinct captains throughout Iowa reported hours-long wait times when they tried to call in their results on Monday night.
  • "Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines," one 4chan user wrote, according to NBC News.
  • The Party also said it was inundated with calls from supporters of President Trump. "The unexplained, and at times hostile, calls contributed to the delay in the Iowa Democratic Party's collection of results, but in no way affected the integrity of information gathered or the accuracy of data sets reported," Iowa Democratic Party chair Troy Price told Bloomberg in a statement.
  • That made getting through extra difficult for Iowans who were already struggling to use a buggy app to report results. So much for Plan B.
Issie Lapowsky

Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

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