Pew gets it. Post Office doesn’t.

Pew continues to get things right. In this article they discuss the new idiocy of pollsters polling chatbots. Obviously Pew isn’t playing that game.

A more subtle problem is people using chatbots to make money by taking polls in huge quantities with fake URLs. Is Pew susceptible to this trick?

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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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The key is send vs receive. Fakers can send their ads and requests by paper mail, though it’s rare these days because it costs actual money. Even if a Pew invitation happens to reach a faker, he couldn’t use multiple identities. Pew is expecting one paper or online 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!