Bogus Tesla Polls Are Bogus
Via the US website Electrek, which does news about electric vehicles and adjacent subjects, a story about bogus polls.
A bogus online clicky poll in Germany got 100,000 clicks and found that 94% of the time that a button was clicked, it corresponded to “absolutely not willing to buy a Tesla”. Electrek calls this “100,000 Germans”, based on very little evidence.
The poll kept running. By the time it had 470,000 clicks, only 29% of the clicks corresponded to “absolutely not willing to buy a Tesla”. Quite a lot of these clicks — 253,000 — came from just two IP addresses in the US. A bit of maths shows that the clicks from the two US addresses made up about three-quarters of the pro-Tesla clicks.
The magazine, T-Online, was forced to the shocking conclusion that its meaningless customer-engagement exercise had been manipulated by someone else’s meaningless customer-engagement exercise.
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 »