Curious whether the effect survives controlling for pollster. Some pollsters have consistent house effects and some have much bigger followings, so part of the slope could be "polls from well-known outfits get reposted more" rather than "favorable margins get reposted more".
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
bombcar•34m ago
It takes extensive work to get around that problem alone, let alone "viral" and other worthless push-polls - work that even the very best in the industry, at the highest level, can make major mistakes on.
wtch98•26m ago
When they are 3 or 4 percentage points off they are ripped to shreds.
The polls for the recent Brazil elections were about 49% for Lula, the result was 52%, that's a 3 point difference, not a massive error margin. With brexit the polling pointed to about 52% for remain, actual result was 48%.
But those are proper polling companies, not worthless online ones.
sublinear•26m ago
Do you have one example of a poll that isn't?
Legend2440•14m ago
gruez•20m ago
But most polls I see are from professional pollsters like Pew or YouGov? For them, correcting for this is opinion polls 101. That's why you see "representative sample". They're not just randomly polling 1000 people and taking the average. They're adjusting for a bunch of other demographic factors as well.
toomim•15m ago
In order to account for that, you need you know how many people who are less likely to respond are voting for that candidate. And then you're back to square one.
This is why professional polls have had a consistent bias over the last few years, as this hidden unobservable factor's effect has gotten stronger and stronger.
bombcar•13m ago
bombcar•14m ago
Doing a proper poll is expensive and (frankly) most of the time is pretty predictable or you can get 90% of the results with 10% of the effort, and most times you don't actually care about the results because you're building it to get a result you want anyway.
(Interestingly enough elections themselves almost by definition have notable discrepancies to a "true" perfect sampling; but it's usually overcome by the sheer volume.)