alt Hacker NewsAll polls are flawed. Remember last US pres election polls by CNN? Completely wrong. Why? Because they surveyed mostly left-"learing" participants.
Right and supposedly middle (this doesn't exist) media does the same.
That means we gotta find the average as you suggested.
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Side note
> Given that Musk has absolutely destroyed the Twitter API for academic use
Why bring up Musk, when you can simply say, "Twitter lowered Academic API rate limit because ...". You sound like you need someone to blame not professional and politically motivated (yes the post is about the political poll but this shows the "bias" and his supposed poll will be biased depending on how he gathered data).
Twitter would have the same way of generating metrics for the justification as you are trying to justify the flaw in the poll outcome.
Most likely the decision is based on their internal metrics/dashboard report
Replies
In 2021 Twitter was encouraging free academic use of the API [0].
This was in line with long standing behaviors in this space [1].
Musk bought Twitter in 2022. In 2023, they began substantially restricting API access versus how it had been for years.
It is not unfair at all to look at that timeline, look at Musk's acquisition as the biggest change that had happened to the company in that timeframe, and draw a relationship.
[0] https://newsonline.library.vanderbilt.edu/2021/03/use-twitte...
> Remember last US pres election polls by CNN? Completely wrong.
I do. I don't remember that at all. I think you might have some odd definition of completely wrong though.
But please, by all means, share these 100% wrong polls that showed, for example, Trump having 0% chance of winning. Most of the polls I saw were fairly accurate within their margin of error and made it clear the race was tight (which, in the end, it was). And nothing I've seen has changed that, but if you have polls from CNN specifically that you can point to, by all means.
These are all problematic statements.
- CNN doesn't do polling, they have firms do that
- All reputable firms try get valid results, they have professionals, they know who they are talking to and the limits. What we see in the last 2-3 weeks of the elections are the polls they want to release however, those that err in one direction or another.
- They definitely accommodate for misrepresentation samples - if more of their respondents indicate 'registered republicans' than in the general public they will adjust.
- It's very hard to measure 1) the people that are hard to reach and statistically more likely to not trust pollsters and 2) likelihood of actual voting aka enthusiasm.
- there are plenty of centrist institutions and pollsters
- It's fair to call out Elon because he's making the policies
Twitter is just a bad way to measure anything except for the Zeitgeist of Twitter readers.