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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday September 28 2016, @03:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the stuffing-the-ballot-box dept.

You may be getting trolled right now without even knowing it.

Donald Trump supporters artificially manipulated the results of online polls to create a false narrative that the Republican nominee won the first presidential debate on Monday night.

The efforts originated from users of the pro-Trump Reddit community r/The_Donald and 4chan messaged boards, which bombarded around 70 polls, including those launched by Time, Fortune, and CNBC.

In this latest incarnation, multiple Reddit users enlisted the Trump-supporting masses on r/The_Donald, which has over 200,000 subscribers, by posting dozens of online polls that are vulnerable to vote brigading, bots, and other forms of manipulation that make these non-scientific surveys notoriously unreliable.

Polls that were not open to public voting consistently put Clinton ahead of Trump. In a flash poll by Public Policy Polling, Clinton led Trump 51 to 40. A CNN/ORC poll conducted immediately following the debate found significantly stronger support for Clinton, who topped Trump 62 to 27.

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trump-clinton-debate-online-polls-4chan-the-donald/


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @06:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @06:47AM (#407247)

    You accidentally just showed an example of what he was talking about. Polls are generally carefully organized to ensure a representative sampling.

    26% of the respondents who participated in tonight's survey identified themselves as Republicans, 41% identified themselves as Democrats, and 33% identified themselves as Independents.

    2016 data [gallup.com] from Gallup puts the political distribution in the US as 29% democrat, 26% republican, 42% independent. CNN massively oversampled democrats while maintaining a proper sampling of republicans. I have 0 doubt their sampling of "independents" was just about as well done. I used to kind of roll my eyes when people would speak conspiratorially of the "mainstream media", but in reality it's sadly true and real issue. The "mainstream media" is becoming akin to the bad tabloids you used to see by the checkout at the grocery. Any notion of journalistic integrity or honesty is long gone. And it's made even worse in many ways because they try to pretend like they're speaking honestly and many people do believe this, whereas everybody knows tabloids are not to be taken at face value.

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:59AM

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:59AM (#407271) Journal

    So subtract 12% points from each of Clinton's scores and she still comes out ahead of Trump.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @05:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @05:19PM (#407518)

    > 2016 data from Gallup puts the political distribution in the US as 29% democrat, 26% republican, 42% independent. CNN massively oversampled democrats while maintaining a proper sampling of republicans.

    Eh. No single poll is definitive. This stuff is all fuzzy. Pew has different numbers: [people-press.org] 33% democrat, 29% republican and 34% independent. Maybe CNN was a little high on democrats, but it isn't hard to believe that people who were independents leaning towards a party last year have decided they are now part of a party based on what they've seen over the last year.

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:56PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:56PM (#407586) Homepage Journal

    You accidentally just showed an example of what he was talking about. Polls are generally carefully organized to ensure a representative sampling.

    26% of the respondents who participated in tonight's survey identified themselves as Republicans, 41% identified themselves as Democrats, and 33% identified themselves as Independents.

    2016 data from Gallup puts the political distribution in the US as 29% democrat, 26% republican, 42% independent. CNN massively oversampled democrats while maintaining a proper sampling of republicans. I have 0 doubt their sampling of "independents" was just about as well done. I used to kind of roll my eyes when people would speak conspiratorially of the "mainstream media", but in reality it's sadly true and real issue. The "mainstream media" is becoming akin to the bad tabloids you used to see by the checkout at the grocery. Any notion of journalistic integrity or honesty is long gone. And it's made even worse in many ways because they try to pretend like they're speaking honestly and many people do believe this, whereas everybody knows tabloids are not to be taken at face value.

    Not really. what happened is that you accidentally showed your ignorance about survey methodologies and the use of weighted samples [wikipedia.org]:

    In many situations the sample fraction may be varied by stratum and data will have to be weighted to correctly represent the population. Thus for example, a simple random sample of individuals in the United Kingdom might include some in remote Scottish islands who would be inordinately expensive to sample. A cheaper method would be to use a stratified sample with urban and rural strata. The rural sample could be under-represented in the sample, but weighted up appropriately in the analysis to compensate.

    A random sample was done and the data was weighted (as is done in most surveys) to ensure an accurate result.

    Lest you think I'm just another paid shill, lying to support the MSM narrative (yes, we're everywhere! MWAHHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!), go ahead and query your preferred search engine for "sample weighting." I think you'll find it instructive.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr