Why run online pseudo-polls?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 February 2006 at 11:17
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Mobile Phones, Muhammad cartoons

The Washington Post’s Kevin Sullivan has a story about the role of new media technologies in fuelling the row surrounding the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Text messages, blogs, helped spread rumour, gossip - and in some cases, misinformation - and help organise the various responses by Muslim groups.

One use the story documents is to manipulate online polls run by news organisations:

In London, Azzam Tamimi, a member of the Muslim Association of Britain, said text messages were being used to bring out the vote in opinion polls on the Internet. On Tuesday, he received a group message asking him to respond to a poll that a German newspaper was conducting about whether it should publish the cartoons. Even though the poll was aimed at readers in Germany, Tamimi said, instant global communication means “there are no barriers anymore.”

His group is helping to stage a rally Saturday in London’s Trafalgar Square. Organizers hope to attract thousands of moderate Muslims through mass e-mails and text messaging.

Abdul-Rehman Malik, a contributing editor of Q-News, a popular Muslim magazine in Britain, said he had received hundreds of e-mails and dozens of text messages about the cartoons. He said some messages were computer-generated so that thousands of phones could be reached nearly instantly, such as one telling him to reply “no” to a British TV survey about whether to broadcast the cartoons. “It’s efficient and immediate — the ultimate activists’ dream,” Malik said.

The UK Independence Party recently used similar tactics to manipulate a BBC poll into who was the most powerful person in Britain. The anti-EU party mobilised its supporters to vote for EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in order to highlight the influence of the EU on British politics.

But even without this sort of manipulation, online polls of the sort run by many news organisations on their web sites have never had any scientific validity whatsoever. The information they generate is meaningless because the sample is self-selecting. Rather than condemning political groups for attempting to manipulate such polls, we should be asking why news organsiations, which should be in the business of reporting truth, conduct and report on such pseudo-polls at all.

For commerical web sites, the answer is simple: polls — especially ones that are highlighted and rigged by activists — drive traffic to a new site. And that’s good for advertising sales. Telephone polls used by some TV broadcasters raise even more money with per-call charges. It’s a money spinner, but the outcome is inevitably also more spin than fact.