A Fake Pollster Confessed — and the Right Turned It Into a Conspiracy
From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread
Wedgewood Polls admitted on October 20 that its numbers were fabricated, calling the whole thing a social experiment exposing how little scrutiny political polling gets. Within hours, the confession was folded into partisan narratives: right-wing influencers and figures like FCC Chairman Brendan Carr seized on it to argue that polls, especially ones favoring Democrats, can't be trusted. The University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public traces how the story spread and warns it could feed "rigged election" claims.
We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary? The short answer: Far too easy.
- jscomino
They were trying to influence the election, they just got caught and made an excuse.
- treebeard901
It is sometimes difficult to find publicly released polling for many different races, especially the down ballot ones. Other polling is done but kept internally and not released for free.
If a fake polling company could be set up to release polls for underreported races that are being traded on prediction markets then you could make a good bit of money by timing your trades to the release of your fake poll.
The goal is not just to influence the prediction markets to game a profit, it would also be to hope that once the polls influence the prediction markets, that it will feed back into the voters to actually influence the result.
- zug_zug
Hard to say what the takeaway or lesson is here, other than having trustworthy professionals disseminating unbiased information is a public good and losing it creates paranoia and social distrust everywhere.
- MarkusQ
As long as we're introspecting, and being on the watch for influence campaigns, it may be instructive to scan the article for the use of `/(center[ -])?(left|right)([ -](wing|leaning))?/` designations.
- gcanyon
Were they trying to influence:
- the election
- the betting markets
My thought is the latter. And the idea that it was just an experiment is BS.