Rigging allegations mar Teen Choice Awards

Published August 12, 2014
Tyler Posey, left, and Sarah Hyland, right, present the award to Demi Lovato for choice summer song for "Really Don't Care" and choice summer music star: female at the Teen Choice Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014, in Los Angeles. – Photo by AP
Tyler Posey, left, and Sarah Hyland, right, present the award to Demi Lovato for choice summer song for "Really Don't Care" and choice summer music star: female at the Teen Choice Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014, in Los Angeles. – Photo by AP
Shailene Woodley, from left, Nat Wolff and Ansel Elgort accept the award for choice movie: drama for "The Fault In Our Stars" at the Teen Choice Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014, in Los Angeles. – Photo by AP
Shailene Woodley, from left, Nat Wolff and Ansel Elgort accept the award for choice movie: drama for "The Fault In Our Stars" at the Teen Choice Awards at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014, in Los Angeles. – Photo by AP

LOS ANGELES: Fox TV’s Teen Choice Awards (TCA) 2014 were in for an unexpected angry rebuttal as the Twitter trend of #TeensChoiceAwards was overtaken by #TeensDontHaveAChoiceAwards.

The latter became the top trending Twitter hash tag on Sunday during the Fox broadcast of the ceremony after web celebrities exposed the rigging process of the votes.

This year, the show was co-hosted by Tyler Posey of Teen Wolf and Sarah Hyland of Modern Family, who confirmed that 165 million votes were cast online for the 16th annual awards.

Fox's TCA, which is a highly awaited event amongst young people, hands out surfboard trophies to movie, music, TV and fashion icons, that bag the highest teen votes.

The show was backfired when these stars exposed the rigged voting procedure on Twitter.

After losing the “Choice Web Star: Male” to famous Youtube personality, Tyler Oakley (25 years old with 2.85 million followers), Vine sensation Cameron Dallas (18 year old with 3.31 m followers) started to tweet bitterly about how the voting had been rigged.

According to Washington Post, Dallas won the “Choice Viner”, but was apparently still bitter to lose in the “Web Star” category to Oakley.

The star tweeted during the show, "It’s funny how they told me I won the viner award 6 days before the voting ended and made the runners up still vote to tweet for them.”

However, the tweets were later deleted.

Following the footsteps of Dallas, Matt Espinosa (16 years old with 1.91 million followers), another upset Vine celebrity and nominee of the same category, also joined the argument and seemed upset that the producers encouraged him to ask for votes even when they knew he had lost.

“Basically they picked the people almost 6 days before voting was done and used all of us for promotion,” he tweeted.

Another Vine star, Carter Reynolds (16 years old with a following of 1.91m) also decided to give his two cents on the issue even when he was not nominated. He tweeted, “#TCAs is rigged,” he wrote before adding “#TCAS2014 used all of us for promotion. What a joke.” Along with the hashtag “#TeensDontHaveaChoiceAwards”, which was trending worldwide on Twitter.

Interestingly, Dallas and Espinosa deleted their tweets but the damage is already done as the Internet is now swarming with their screen grabs.

The hashtag “#TeensDontHaveaChoiceAwards” continues to trend, as fans angrily vent out their annoyance on Twitter, furious for having wasted hours of voting for their idols when the show had already informing winners before the voting period ended.

Furthermore, the anger really caught fire when viewers started tweeting screengrabs of the disclaimer at the end of last year’s show, which stated the winners of each category are essentially decided by a “committee” of producers:


The winners


The controversies spiced up an otherwise dull awards ceremony, where Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort of The Fault in Our Stars rode a victorious wave.

Here are the winners mentioned on the show:

Choice Summer Song

“Fancy,” Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX

“Really Don’t Care,” Demi Lovato featuring Cher Lloyd — winner

“Rude,” Magic!

“Summer,” Calvin Harris

“Wiggle,” Jason Derulo featuring Snoop Dogg

Choice Movie Actor: Drama

Bradley Cooper, American Hustle

Russell Crowe, Noah

Jason Dohring, Veronica Mars

Ansel Elgort, The Fault in Our Stars — winner

Jon Hamm, Million Dollar Arm

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