Social media polls deliberately skew political realities of 2016, 2020 US presidential elections, finds researchers

JULY 16, 2024

Editors' notes

Informal political polls conducted on X/Twitter during both the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections were significantly skewed by questionable votes, many of which may have been purchased from troll farms.

This conclusion, reached by a team of scientists led by Przemyslaw (Przemek) Grabowicz, research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, shows that X/Twitter's poll system deliberately reports biased public vote counts. On average, the results of such questionable polls favored Donald Trump over Joe Biden, 58% to 42% in a head-to-head comparison, during 2020.

The team additionally found that there were approximately 50% more questionable votes in pre-election polls than in those following the presidential elections, suggesting that skewing social polls is a deliberate tactic to influence political outcomes.

In 2024, such biased social polling from X/Twitter was publicly featured by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, presumably to create the impression of his overwhelming popularity. These results are detailed in two papers, one published recently in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media and the other available on the arXiv preprint server.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-social-media-polls-deliberately-skew.html