alt Hacker NewsFrom confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread
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They were trying to influence the election, they just got caught and made an excuse.
It is sometimes difficult to find publicly released polling for many different races, especially the down ballot ones. Other polling is done but kept internally and not released for free.
If a fake polling company could be set up to release polls for underreported races that are being traded on prediction markets then you could make a good bit of money by timing your trades to the release of your fake poll.
The goal is not just to influence the prediction markets to game a profit, it would also be to hope that once the polls influence the prediction markets, that it will feed back into the voters to actually influence the result.
Hard to say what the takeaway or lesson is here, other than having trustworthy professionals disseminating unbiased information is a public good and losing it creates paranoia and social distrust everywhere.
Were they trying to influence:
- the election
- the betting markets
"Why we did this [...]
Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public's trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology."
so they decided to address this by further eroding public trust in polls. neat trick.
There is a lot of crap being produced to sway the election from all sides of the political spectrum.
A more serious question of how and why an organization such as the NYTimes (and others of similar stature) would so easily and quickly incorporate polling data from a brand new polling company into its election data and articles and be so easily fooled.
And, when this was uncovered, they did not do much more than what seemed the minimal amount to CYA, quietly backing out the data and issuing an editors note that few people would find.
They do not seem that interested in protecting their reputation, or maybe they don't believe their readers care.
Seems like the kind of thing someone should go to jail for. You can't just run a "social experiment" by committing fraud and lying to people, and that's assuming this isn't just an excuse someone came up with once they knew they would be caught.
Please release more fake polls. Polling is almost always an attempt to influence elections, which is why they press release them. The results are race-based astrology. There's little reason to believe that fake polls will be statistically less accurate than real ones. People pretend like the prediction markets are news, and they're just a group of degenerate gamblers with money to burn who are summarizing what they're reading on twitter.
It is insane that Democratic candidates are dropping out of races as a result of reading fake polls on twitter. If their candidacy could be destroyed by that, it shouldn't have been started in the first place. Also, typical authoritarian solution to try to figure out how to eliminate or prosecute fake polls, rather than to end the substitution of triangulation for belief. It would be wonderful if someone could believe in something other than winning. You might win; people are starved for candidates who believe in something other than personal enrichment.
You can't libel the general public. I can lie about whatever poll I want, as long as I'm not selling you anything (which would be fraud.) Politicians can't be prosecuted for the promises they made during the campaign that they immediately abandoned after being elected, but I, a random citizen, am held to a higher standard about my pronouncements of the opinions of the randomly chosen and race-weighted public? Get out of here...
Normally I wouldn't say something that lightheaded but.. I think this is what psyops look like. I'm not claiming it is one. But it sure sounds like one.
"Its just a prank, bro."
Always know something is bullshit when I see Gunther Eagleman show up.
> Wedgewood Polls — a small polling firm that had launched in June 2026
Yeah a new company setup a few months before the election doing this. Doesn't sound shady at all.
The pivot to claiming it was an experiment is just damage control for being caught.
As long as we're introspecting, and being on the watch for influence campaigns, it may be instructive to scan the article for the use of `/(center[ -])?(left|right)([ -](wing|leaning))?/` designations.