this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Seeing as the vast majority of "polls" I've seen in the last 5-6 years have been "this was a poll done online, so we can't assign any certainty or margin of error, cause we have no idea who actually responded and it could've been just like, two dickheads with bots spamming nonsense, but the results were click baity enough for us to run a story" .......... I don't see how them cutting out the two dickhead middle-men, and just using their own bots, is really that much different.
The only math class I ever enjoyed was a college statistics class which actually made sense to me. So I spent my life reading polls, always checking the sample size and the margin of error, because I knew how important those are to accuracy, etc. But that same knowledge also served to let me know that modern polls are becoming horsehit.
I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh telling his listeners to either refuse to take polls, or to lie on them and say the opposite. He, and others, taught MAGAs to disrespect polls (cuz polls are the enemy of predatory politics).
Also, many of the "pollsters" are MAGA operatives in disguise. Add unreliable pollsters to unreliable respondents, and you end up with a weird poll that doesn't reflect reality at all.
I no longer enjoy tracking polls. Too many of them have been games.
Yeah -- I think a lot of people who took even just one stats course are in a similar boat. Though I think it's a bit easier to understand the shift if you frame it within the context of Social Media sites controlling the population's opinions / propaganda.
Most govts understand at this point, internally at least, that if a message is repeated often, loudly, and it saturates a people's media, they start to believe it / agree with it. The survey, and the reporting storm surrounding a survey, isn't so much about showing people an accurate representation of how people's viewpoints vary, but rather a vehicle for govts/companies to tell people how to think. Sites like Facebook don't so much as sell advertising, as they sell the ability to socially engineer its users to like your product / political stance: make enough general noise about a niche position, and people will think it's a majority opinion.
Where the bots get used in the workflow, isn't really that big of a concern.
Valid. Media Manipulation is the name of the game right now, but that's so inefficient. You throw out a bunch of propaganda, and hope something gets traction.
Soon, Data Manipulation will be more important. They'll start tracking all your date points, and soon they'll find something they can manipulate you over. They'll find some obscure crime to leverage you with, like a wrong statement on a Federal form interpreted as a deliberate lie, rather than a confused wrong answer. Or they'll identify patterns, and create laws to make those patterns a crime, and get you on that.
They'll threaten your family, job, your healthcare, your money, your home, your freedom, and they'll eventually get you to dance to their tune.