Zuckerberg beats Assange to claim Person of the Year
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Julian Assange came in third, behind the Tea Party, the chaotic but influential agglomeration of US right wingers.
Time said the Facebook founder deserved its award "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives".
Wikileaks connected the rest of the world to the US government. The Time magazine bluntly ignored their reader's choice, who voted Assange as #1. They not only ignored, but also removed him from the voting list but, pro forma, listed him as #3 in the final results; after the Tea Party that is. Effectively this means that the Time does not care about reader opinions at all; Assange was ahead of Erdogan (by roughly 150,000 votes), ahead of Obama (by almost 14 times as many votes) and way, way ahead of Zuckerberg (who got a whopping 4.8% of the votes compared to Assange). Quite sad for a magazine which supports media oppression through governments with that choice.