Any instance when internet chat rooms or subreddit groups rouse a significant number of
anonymous individuals to support a cause or an individual with the
aim of exercising the group'
s bandwidth to
hi-jack or manipulate things in the real world,
The Sanjaya effect is named after its first well-known publicized occurrence in 2006 when a
Reddit group of mostly young males decided to
hi-jack American Idol's voting systems to push a mediocre singer, Sanjaya Malakar, into the final competition. When he had consistently disappointed the judges for weeks on end, and still made it into the final competition with the last two other singers, the judges decided they had to take voting back into their own hands to
stop the internet trolls from ruining the whole sixth season's final competition.
"The Sanjaya Effect" is now an easy way to explain what might appear as ludicrous events that may seem to occur with little reason but when taking into account the ease by which the
internet allows individuals to anonymously conspire together to form large cohorts that bring about change in the real world with social media and manipulation of voting systems, it is now par for the course that such
internet groups exist and always will exist.
Examples of the Sanjaya Effect are plentiful, including TV Shows
like American Idol, season 6 in 2006, or stock prices (e.g. the
2021 Game Stop Frenzy), or cryptocurrency prices (e.g. The DogeCoin Pump Scheme, followed by Shibu Inu and Floki Inu pump and dump
internet conspiracies in succession)
