Pew continues to get things right. In this article they discuss the new idiocy of pollsters polling chatbots. Obviously Pew isn’t going along with “silicon sampling”.
A more subtle problem is people using chatbots to make money by taking polls in huge quantities with fake URLs. I wouldn’t know how to solve this. Is Pew susceptible?
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No. That threat applies to “opt-in” surveys. Those are polls that people can proactively sign up to take – for example, by responding to social media ads offering a reward for taking a survey. Since it’s easy to adopt a fake identity online, opt-in polling opens the door to AI and bad actors seeking to commit fraud.
We don’t use opt-in surveys at Pew Research Center. We use probability-based sampling instead. That means we select real people in real life, not online. We start with a giant list of all U.S. home addresses and randomly select some of them.
We initially contact people by snail mail, and each year we invite only a carefully selected sample of the public to take our surveys.
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Smart on two levels. First, using postal addresses filters out fakers. You can buy a fake URL for a few cents, but you CAN’T buy a fake postal address. The PO knows which addresses are real residents. Most faking factories are purely online, some use forwarding services.
Second, the Pew method automatically excludes another form of faking. Even if a Pew invitation happens to reach a faker, he couldn’t give multiple responses. Pew is expecting one response from one specific person.
Paper mail both ways is the best identity guard.
The Post Office should be hitting this point hard in its ads. I’ve been keeping up with their publicity podcast, and I don’t hear this message. Instead they’re going along with the Altman cocksuckers, proudly adopting bots for their own purposes. Bad idea!!!!! Independence is your best selling point, dammit!
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