How Should Social Media Handle Election Polls That Turned Out To Be Misinformation?

How Should Social Media Handle Election Polls That Turned Out To Be Misinformation?

4 years ago
Anonymous $RGO3jP_V_c

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201108/23384945672/how-should-social-media-handle-election-polls-that-turned-out-to-be-misinformation.shtml

It appears that the various election polls that predicted Joe Biden would become the 46th President of the United States eventually proved accurate -- the current President's temper tantrum notwithstanding -- but that doesn't mean the polls did a good job. In fact, most people are recognizing that the pollsters were wrong in many, many ways. They predicted a much bigger win for Biden, including multiple states that easily went to Trump. They completely flubbed many down ballot House and Senate races as well. Pollsters are now trying to figure out what went wrong and what these misses mean, coming on the heels of a set of bad predictions in 2016 as well. It's likely there isn't any simple answer, but a variety of factors involved.

However, what interests me is the simple fact that it turned out that the major polls were actually widely shared misinformation that spread all over social media, presenting incorrect information about the election -- some of which almost certainly had the likelihood of impacting voting behavior.

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