Twitter polls and news feeds
I don’t know why this feels worse that the bogus clicky polls on newspaper websites. Maybe it’s the thought of someone actually believing the sampling scheme says something useful. Maybe it’s being in Twitter, where following a news headline feed usually gets you news headlines. Maybe it’s that the polls are so bad: restricting a discussion of Middle East politics to two options with really short labels makes even the usual slogan-based dialogue look good in comparison.
In any case, I really hope this turns out to be a failed experiment, and that we can keep Twitter polls basically as jokes.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »