Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’

Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points. The poll was also cited by the California Post. A widely followed polling aggregator on X also shared the group’s Nevada poll, although several credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median polling because they could not verify its methodology.

    • Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca
      161·
      5 days ago

      at the end of the day, if any company/corporation/CEO/executive says something… you know it’s a complete fucking lie

    • Maeve@kbin.earth
      193·
      5 days ago

      At first I felt angry at the guy, and maybe he deserves some ire, but upon a little further reflection, this reminds me that our media are lazy and sloppy, at minimum, more likely complicit, more often, and MBFC quintillions of times more.

      And finally, ultimately, it’s on us as well, for knowing these things and taking unknown pollsters at face value. And while I’m at it, Nate Silver has been wrong a few times, too. And we shouldn’t be bandwagoning, anyway. So plenty of blame to share, including among ourselves.

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
      143·
      5 days ago

      I mean he was a student. If the news was so easily influenced by a kid, don’t blame the kid.

  • undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch
    113·
    5 days ago

    Genius. I’m really sick of people claiming to do their “own research” only to quote absolute drivel. This is a great example of how easy misinformation spreads even through “official” or “professional” looking venues.

  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
    51·
    4 days ago

    I did this once, except I just messed with the polls on most of Australia’s biggest news outlets. It was surprisingly easy to do, and even the outlets themselves reported on my fabrications.

    It was good lulz tho. Especially when they finally figured out that they’d been had. They all stopped running polls after that.

  • BassTurd@lemmy.world
    57·
    5 days ago

    It feels like there could be a case built against this asshole for election interference. Maybe not a strong one, but it could really fuck up his life, which he deserves.