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 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 [said] on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”