Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Oops!... I Did It Again: Multiple Participation In Opt-In "Polls"

Recently I was involved in a Twitter exchange (of sorts, given the other party's predilection for blocking people they are arguing with) with the founder of a boutique poll-shaped object that I consider to be pretty much complete nonsense.  This "poll" operates by a combination of panel surveying (I wouldn't call it a panel poll as such, since every panel member can respond) and opt-in responses.  

During the (mostly now deleted) tweets in question I have formed the view that the person involved has some unusually serious mental health issues (at least intermittently). Given the way they characterised the experience of being replied to by me and another chap with similar interests, I'd rather soften the impact by not naming them.  However, during the exchange they dared me to vote multiple times in their poll (implying they would detect and remove duplicates), and I said I would do it.  In the interests of science, I publish the details and offer a hypothesis for falsification - if the other party is up to it.  My hypothesis is that I can participate multiple times in this agency's polling and the founder will not be able to catch me.  


Here are the details.  In the most recent wave of this outfit's "poll" I participated and submitted completed responses multiple times.  The first participation was as a panel member who had supplied an email address.  In this participation I claimed to be living in my home state, but I also claimed to be younger than I am, and adopted an occasional alias taken from an early horror novel by a now world-famous fantasy author.  (That's easily enough information for the poll owner to identify my panel account, but let's make them do a bit of work first.)


Then, I participated in the "poll" again through opt-in social media links somewhere between one and four times.  Each participation came from a distinct device, a distinct IP address, and a distinct ISP, and represented me as a different person in a different electorate.  

Of course, it is easy for people screening for multiple responses to such "polls" to catch stupid duplicates (those using the same IP address or the same user agent - every forum admin knows these tricks for catching sock puppet accounts).  But clever duplicates are not in my view catchable.  

Since the so-called pollster claimed they could detect all multiple voting attempts ("If you think I don't clean for multiple responses from the same person you are out of your mind") the onus is now on them to prove they have effectively cleaned all my multiple responses from their sample (the results of which have already been published).  They can do this by posting a public statement providing enough anonymised detail to identify my duplicate responses other than the Tasmanian one (and they can also name the Tasmanian one and tell me what they thought of the novel).  I have retained relevant screenshots of all these responses and will, if necessary (eg if the "pollster" makes a false claim identifying me as submitting a response that I didn't) complete and provide a statutory declaration concerning which responses are mine.  If the pollster can correctly identify the duplicate in one attempt, I will congratulate them and never criticise them again.  If they can't, they owe me a grovelling public apology.

My prediction is that this "pollster" will never be able to identify my multiple responses, and that no other "pollster" using the same method could screen out all multiple voting either.  They're lost in this game, and if they ever tell anyone that they can competently screen all responses and eliminate all duplicates in an opt-in online poll setting, to that there can be only one possible response:

"I'm not that innocent".

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(Author's NB: fear not, I am not a fan of either the song or especially of the singer. Though if there is any more such nonsense from this "pollster" the next episode may be set to the much better "Toxic".)

2 comments:

The comment system is unreliable. If you cannot submit comments you can email me a comment (via email link in profile) - email must be entitled: Comment for publication, followed by the name of the article you wish to comment on. Comments are accepted in full or not at all. Comments will be published under the name the email is sent from unless an alias is clearly requested and stated. If you submit a comment which is not accepted within a few days you can also email me and I will check if it has been received.