Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way

[Whoa_Nelly]

Fairly long article, so here are a few beginning snips...


Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way

by Simon Owens
November 6, 2008


During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after gathering a few thousand votes.

But in the weeks after it was removed, someone unearthed the still-present URL for the poll and linked to it at the conservative website, Free Republic. The site has become famous for sending hordes of readers to crash unscientific online polls, so much so that the act of doing so has been termed "freeping." In this particular instance, members of the Free Republic felt that the poll showed a sign of bias, and the poster linked to it to "provide them with a result they did not expect."

"Send this email to every non-liberal you know," the person wrote. "Let's get some balance into this survey group. This is the easiest vote you will ever make. It takes literally two seconds."

<snip>
One of the bloggers who eventually linked to the poll was PZ Myers. An associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris, Myers is arguably the most popular atheist and science blogger on the Net. His blog, Pharyngula, is published as part of the Science Blog network (owned by Seed Media Group) and averages more than 50,000 readers a day. In recent months, he and a small group of other atheist bloggers have begun a constant and often-successful campaign to crash online unscientific polls, usually to counterbalance or push back against what they see as either anti-science or overly-dogmatic beliefs.


<snip>
I spoke to the science blogger, and Myers told me that when he links to a poll he can typically swing the results by 10,000 to 20,000 votes in a particular direction. Indeed, within an hour after he linked to the Sun's poll, the results went from 67 percent of the respondents saying "no" to 91 percent "yes." Though he has participated in poll crashes dating back to over a year ago, he has only begun conducting them on a semi-daily basis within the last month and a half.

"It's a very popular thing with some people because they can flex a little itty bitty muscle, and a group going there and doing something shows we have some clout, a clout in expressing an opinion," Myers said. "There have been a couple places where the polls are so poorly done and so easily manipulated, and people go nuts; they write a script and send in hundreds of thousands of votes. Which is kind of cheating, but the whole point is that these polls are silly and useless anyway."

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/poll-crashers-tilt-unscientific-polls-their-way311.html

[HopeFor2006]

1. All the more reason for us to continue to DU the same polls

[onetwo]

2. Wow, long read. I'll check it out right after I DU this poll...

;)

[Whoa_Nelly]

3. ..............

:P