this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
717 points (95.2% liked)

News

23311 readers
3452 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago (2 children)

way down at the bottom here::

opt in polling from web based "interview". So, probably. nobody even remotely tech savy (aka has an ad blocker) ever participated. but anyhow... here's what pew research has to say about the effects of interview mode:

Where differences occurred, they were especially large on three broad types of questions: Items that asked the respondent to assess the quality of their family and social life produced differences of 18 and 14 percentage points, respectively, with those interviewed on the phone reporting higher levels of satisfaction than those who completed the survey on the Web.

Questions about societal discrimination against several different groups also produced large differences, with telephone respondents more apt than Web respondents to say that gays and lesbians, Hispanics and blacks face a lot of discrimination. However, there was no significant mode difference in responses to the question of whether women face a lot of discrimination.

Web respondents were far more likely than those interviewed on the phone to give various political figures a “very unfavorable” rating, a tendency that was concentrated among members of the opposite party of each figure rated.

Statistically significant mode effects also were observed on several other questions. Telephone respondents were more likely than those interviewed on the Web to say they often talked with their neighbors, to rate their communities as an “excellent” place to live and to rate their own health as “excellent.” Web respondents were more likely than phone respondents to report being unable to afford food or needed medical care at some point in the past twelve months.

ultimately, the legitimacy of the poll would depend on where they solicited their subjects in the poll. You're likely to get a far different answer with advertisements on Truth Social than you would with advertisements on, lets say, a palistinian-american subreddit. but that wasn't addressed in the report, so. we'll never really know.

[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 25 points 9 months ago

Opt-in polling is so bad. It means you only get answers from people with strong opinions. They are polls where the results are shaped like a U instead of a bell curve so it rarely represents the actual 95 percentile.

[–] breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't think it's opt-in in that way though. They have a pre-existing list of millions of pre-screened people and they're selecting a representative sample from that list. Fivethirtyeight ranks them fairly highly among other polls -- certainly high enough for this opinion poll to be considered accurate.

[–] Hamartia@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fivethirtyeight only grades them on their ability to predict american election results. I don't think that's the same as advocating for their efficacy in producing leading public opinion polls.

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You’re right, kinda. Issue polling is generally better than horse race polling and YouGov is no exception.

[–] Hamartia@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's a serious issue when there's a clear political bias in the founders. They put more effort into steering the narrative than objectively reporting it.

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sure, and were there a clear bias your comment would have value.

[–] Hamartia@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

If you haven't seen any clear bias then you probably have a close enough outlook to them to not notice. And that's fine, I don't require everyone to have the same opinion as me for their comments to have value.

My impression of bias is probably born out of the leading polls that rightwing media and thinktanks in the UK commission them to do. You can fairly argue that these polls are externally commissioned so their tenor is a product of their issuer not yougov. But the overall impression I got was that they could be readily depended on to produce misleading propaganda against labour when it wasn't being run by corporate technocrats.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's still selecting from a list of people who have something to say, though.

As far as how accurately they represent broad swaths of america... well, that's a different matter. I would expect your average american to be far more luke warm to any given subject than respondents to a poll.

[–] breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's probably just a problem with polls though -- people who won't answer aren't included. But they're saying that 26-32% of Americans are "unsure," and that sounds pretty lukewarm. Their methodology does sound odd to me too but if it was flawed it would show in the election data, right? Elections are a brutal testing ground. Hundreds of surveys have been predictive and high quality on average.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Agreed on all of that.

I would have guessed 1/3 are “wtf! stop it”, a 1/3 are “bomb them harder!” And then there’s everyone else just doing their thing, going to work. Going to school.