Musk's Twitter polls neither voice of people or God
By Philip Bump / The Washington Post
For those seeking input from a large number of people, it is the best of times. It is also very much the worst of times.
The advent of the internet and social media has both made it trivial to cobble together a group of opinions from an audience and created an audience for whatever putative data analysis you might offer. Perhaps you’ve noticed a glut of inexpensive polling from outlets you’ve never heard of. Maybe you’ve noticed the avalanche of news articles informing you that, to make up an example, the favorite ice cream flavor of residents of Kansas is rum raisin, research conducted by the Baskin-Robbins Polling Institute. You can whip up a survey and find an audience for it with all of the ease of filling out an online form.
For those only vaguely interested in the accuracy of what they’re measuring, this is all great. An unprecedented moment for making numbers appear and for putting those numbers in a news release. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about measuring how people actually feel about things? This is pretty grim.
Yes, online panels have expanded the ability of legitimate pollsters to reach people; pollsters who do things like attempt to weight responses to match the composition of the population. But it also means that your precise measurements compete for attention or influence against things that are hopelessly inaccurate, tainted by bias or simply invented.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-musks-twitter-polls-neither-voice-of-people-or-god/