NYT: Fake Polls in Wisconsin and California Were Part of a ‘Social Experiment’
New York Times article:
An organization that released public election polling in recent weeks withdrew the results of two surveys, revealing that it had fabricated the polls as part of a “short-term social experiment” meant to expose how quickly false information could spread.
One of the surveys released by the group, Median Strategies, claimed that Francesca Hong was leading the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor by more than 20 percentage points. (She went on to lose by less than one percentage point.) Another, shared by Mayor Karen Bass on X in a since-deleted post, showed Ms. Bass leading Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff.
On Monday, Median Strategies withdrew those results, saying they “should not be treated as genuine polling data.”
In a statement posted to the organization’s website, Median Strategies said the fabricated results were intended to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
Median Strategies did not respond to a request for further comment on the incident.
The false polls, particularly the one from the California race, spread widely after being picked up by The California Post and various social media polling aggregators. The results, however, were not published by multiple major polling aggregators, and were not included in The New York Times’s poll trackers because the group did not respond to questions about its methodology.
The experiment came as the number of public pollsters has skyrocketed, with around 30 new pollsters cropping up so far this year. The large number of surveys coming from new, previously untested pollsters has made it increasingly difficult to judge survey quality. But while these new pollsters may be unproven, the vast majority appear to be real.
In Wisconsin, the Median Strategies results were largely in line with the other public polls, all of which greatly underestimated Ms. Hong’s opponent, David Crowley, igniting a wave of criticism of the value of primary polling.
What Median Strategies hoped to accomplish by adding false polls into a saturated marketplace was unclear, even to experts in the field.
Continues on NYT article