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.”
This is distressing but not at all surprising. Real polls take real time and real money. Journalism is dying. If someone offers up a poll that looks ok enough, some desperate media companies are going to take the bait. Once one does, others are more likely to follow.
As a related aside, remember it was just a few months ago or something that we found out that some media are using AI to “simulate” polls and reporting on that.
Well, in that case, that was genius.