Fishy poll results.

[dale mck]

Few days ago the poll in the "opinion" section asked If you trusted the U.S. president. I clicked on my preference ,,at that time the results showed that approx 70% said no, and approx. 28% said yes . Ok ,,,now about 2.5 hours later I checked back to see if it had changed much. Wow,,,had it ever,,,it had done a huge switch that pretty well was a complete reverse from just over 2 hours earlier . The other thing I noticed was the extreme jump in the vote count. The next day the results were showing another reversal back to the no side, but with a huge increase in the vote count. The final count was
Total Votes: 317,785,,,,the average count for a Castanet poll more like 1,500-14,000. What gives here ? Looks very fishy to me. Did this poll get hacked ?

[Bsuds]

You can vote more than once so don't believe any of the polls as accurate on this site.

[dale mck]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

[HorganIsMyHero]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

You can if you know what to do. It's extremely easy to mess with online polls.

[dale mck]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

You can if you know what to do. It's extremely easy to mess with online polls.

Then in that case,,,it pretty well supports my suspicion. Makes no sense to pay any attention to these polls at all !

[whatwhat]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

You can if you know what to do. It's extremely easy to mess with online polls.

As well, if you had read the comments apparently the voter numbers jumped 20,000 votes in 20 minutes or so. As well, people were saying there were more votes than people who had visited the page.

My guess would be bots, but who knows.

[neilsimon]

Yes, bots.
I wrote one using ApacheBench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApacheBench to see how hard it would be. I estimate that I could push about 1,000,000 votes in an hour from a single slow-connection server. It's really simple to do and really obvious too.
Worst thing is that it's trivial to fight this kind of thing

[Bsuds]

It'a not like Castanet polls are important or life changing. They are just fluff and sometimes interesting to see how the masses think.

[neilsimon]

It'a not like Castanet polls are important or life changing. They are just fluff and sometimes interesting to see how the masses think.

True, but the problem is that if someone is manipulating them, and others believe them, it is creating a "truth" in people's minds and one which then impacts their own beliefs. If you repeat something often enough, people just accept it as true, and are very hard to convince otherwise afterwards.

[gman313]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

delete your cookies

[Loki2u]

It'a not like Castanet polls are important or life changing. They are just fluff and sometimes interesting to see how the masses think.

True, but the problem is that if someone is manipulating them, and others believe them, it is creating a "truth" in people's minds and one which then impacts their own beliefs. If you repeat something often enough, people just accept it as true, and are very hard to convince otherwise afterwards.

Then you get what you deserve in my opinion. People that understand how these polls work (or don't work) aren't usually the ones that need convincing of anything.

I see this sort of thing on social media often. If people took more time to form their own informed opinions they wouldn't be so easily led astray. The word 'sheeple' usually comes up often in these situations.

[neilsimon]

...
Then you get what you deserve in my opinion. People that understand how these polls work (or don't work) aren't usually the ones that need convincing of anything.

I see this sort of thing on social media often. If people took more time to form their own informed opinions they wouldn't be so easily led astray. The word 'sheeple' usually comes up often in these situations.

Maybe so. I have seen people post up fake information (fake reports, posters, etc.) and have quite intelligent people actually believe them. I think we have all been deliberately mislead at some point, and sometimes repeatedly.

[Bsuds]

Well,,it doesn't let me vote again after i Voted. You can't just sit there and repeatedly vote.

delete your cookies

Better still don't allow them in the first place.

[Barney Google]

Fake poll

[I see what you did]

poll was real - Castanet got a taste of a first class "the_don" brigading