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Comments (54)

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  swipeharbor
  This filter isn't specific to polls. Anything that reaches people through reshares gets selected on how surprising or pleasing it is, so the visible sample skews toward the tails. Marketing has the same problem with screenshots of campaign results: the ones that travel are the outliers, and anyone calibrating on what they've seen shared ends up with expectations nobody can hit.Curious whether the effect survives controlling for pollster. Some pollsters have consistent house effects and some have much bigger followings, so part of the slope could be "polls from well-known outfits get reposted more" rather than "favorable margins get reposted more".
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  __MatrixMan__
  I think we should do our best to ruin polling data.Polls are the first step in a pipeline that effectively turns money into votes. The better that pipeline functions, the worse our democracy functions. Let the only accurate poll be the election itself.
• bluegatty
  The very nature of the term 'viral' obviously would be disqualifying or hint that something is very awry.The entire objective of a polls is to get a probabilistic sample. That's the whole thing. Anything that deviates that ... creates problematic outcome.
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  bombcar
  Almost all polls are worthless, because the decision to respond to the poll is itself a major portion of the signal.It takes extensive work to get around that problem alone, let alone "viral" and other worthless push-polls - work that even the very best in the industry, at the highest level, can make major mistakes on.
• dlcarrier
  Of course polls that show web unexpected lead for an individuals favorite candidate are more likely to be shared by that individual.
• tonymet
  All polls are not representative. Stated preferences are not revealed preferences. People are terrible at answering honestly. You have to surveil their behavior to understand them.
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  yipinwong
  All polls are flawed. Remember last US pres election polls by CNN? Completely wrong. Why? Because they surveyed mostly left-"learing" participants.Right and supposedly middle (this doesn't exist) media does the same.That means we gotta find the average as you suggested.---Side note> Given that Musk has absolutely destroyed the Twitter API for academic useWhy bring up Musk, when you can simply say, "Twitter lowered Academic API rate limit because ...". You sound like you need someone to blame not professional and politically motivated (yes the post is about the political poll but this shows the "bias" and his supposed poll will be biased depending on how he gathered data).Twitter would have the same way of generating metrics for the justification as you are trying to justify the flaw in the poll outcome.Most likely the decision is based on their internal metrics/dashboard report