After seeing hundreds of freeped polls in the Baltimore Sun, today's finally got my goat. Asking whether the President, House or Senate did more to end the debt crisis, over 6000 votes in the poll concluded that the House wins 63 to 32% with 5% for the senate. This "unscientific" poll is hogwash and always takes positions which are not in the mainstream of Maryland thinking. We let it go at our peril and I am sure that every radio station and newspaper who have these polls gets freeped. Hell, I remember us freeping polls.
So I wrote this to the Sun:
Freeping. v. To be swamped on the internet with comments from an organized group of people. After tactics promoted on the Free Republic blog.
I watch in amusement every day as your poll on the Comments page gets various degrees of opinions, many of which don't represent Maryland I live in. Any poll which could be critical of the President or Governor ends up with large numbers (i.e more than 1000-2000) votes and others affecting local Baltimore issues get 500-800 respondents. While I know the Sun would like to use this number as indication that people care about an issue, you are being Freeped. A perfect case is the poll in Tuesday's Sun which asks whether the President, House or Senate did more to resolve the Debt Ceiling crisis. Over 6000 votes! Amazing. You could imagine that people actually feel this way. However, a twitter site (Lincoln @tforoxprovky20) has your poll up with no comments ... just the link to the poll. Maybe a newspaper could find out who the Twitter site belongs to and who are the 1963 people who follow "tforoxprovky20".
This actually is news and is something for people to consider when you listen to opinion polls which are unscientific. RightOnline, a right-wing advocacy group, just finished training sessions in Minneapolis showing people how to use Twitter to advantage to respond to such polls. It is now apparent that Newt Gingrich's million followers on Twitter are actually a few paid people inventing names like "tforoxprovky20" ... you would hope your mother would never name you that. I hope the Sun would not just use the poll as a way of drumming up business, as if those 6000 people have a subscription like me. Do some reporting and tell us how the internet is being used to rapidly infuse opinion using these media polls.
The Challenge for dKos is simpler. Figure out who these guys are and expose them. If they are paid by GPS Pac, that would really be news.