Is This The Hottest 100 List? [Potential Spoiler]

Some enterprising minds on social media have once again taken up the challenge of deducing the triple j Hottest 100 results ahead of the competition's big day on 26 January, with the Social Hottest 100 Twitter account donning the cowl of unofficial pre-results masters today.

Utilising data from a sample of 2000 voters (at 10 votes each) among "those sharing votes on social media, predominantly Instagram and Twitter users using #hottest100", the results were manually entered into a spreadsheet and tallied, meaning the whole process was a little more hands-on than last year's algorithm released by like-minded social experimenters the Warmest 100.

All being equal, the Social Hottest 100 predicts (somewhat unsurprisingly) that Peking Duk will take out the top spot with High, putting Chet Faker in the second and third positions for Talk Is Cheap and 1998 respectively. They reckon Germany's Milky Chance are a hot shot for #4 (Stolen Dance), with the mighty Duk back on the list at #5 for Take Me Over, feat. SAFIA.

Among the high-profile results lies the most controversial entrant — or non-entrant — of all, Taylor Swift, who in a vacuum is eyeing off a #76 result for Blank Space, according to Social Hottest 100, though they're as uncertain as the rest of us as to whether Swift will even be eligible to be part of the countdown.

Swift's odds of making the cut took a further blow yesterday after ex-triple j presenter Angela Catterns appeared on ABC program The Drum to claim that the Shake It Off scribe had been disqualified from the count "because a fast food chain became involved" in the campaign to get her into the Hottest 100 (skip to 23 minutes).

The suspected chain at the core of Catterns' comments - she did not specify - is none other than KFC, whose Australian Facebook team posted a picture of Swift on 15 January holding a gift voucher for a shade under $20, using the #Tay4Hottest100 campaign as a vehicle to shill chicken to people who should know better.

Apparently, however innocent KFC might be in posting the message - maybe they really do just like Taylor Swift, and not just Taylor Swift fans' money - the move could be in contravention to a rule of the Hottest 100 that stipulates that the station can remove whoever they like from the list if they deem the artist in question to have "benefitted from competitions or commercial campaigns that incentivise fans to vote for them", but given that it's not a direct endorsement of the campaign so much as an attempt to piggyback off its momentum, it's not clear that it's totally spelled doom for the #Tay4Hottest100 campaigners.

Could the Colonel's well-intentioned attempts to stuff the Australian people with fried poultry have undone all the hard work done by T-Swift's scary fan base? Social Hottest 100 or no, looks like you might have to tune in to the j's on Monday after all to find out.

social hottest 100 - the top 20

See the full list at the Social Hottest 100 Twitter page.