A while ago, I posted about what happened when the BBC's Radio 4 tricked a Member of Parliment into proxying his legislative capabilities to an anonymous group of internet voters. (
Hilarity ensued.) Adam Greenfield
added a comment pointing to the America Family Association's Gay Marriage poll, plainly designed to deliver a resounding reaffirmation of the special triune bond between fag-hating straights, the US Government, and The Lord.
And then, as Adam noted then and Wired is reporting now,
Things Did Not Go As Expected. It turns out that when you put something on the internet, other people can get to it, people who might not agree with you.
We're very concerned that the traditional state of marriage is under threat in our country by homosexual activists," said AFA representative Buddy Smith. "It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll -- it was forwarded to them -- and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that.
We asked for user feedback, and _the users caused it to represent something other than what we wanted it to_. That is hard to beat as a direct statement of the glory of this medium.
I am reminded of Eastern Europe once the Communist governments collapsed -- country after country suffered from pyramid schemes because the citizens had no idea how market economies worked. Similarly, organizations like the American Family Association and Radio 4, so completely accustomed to dictating the terms of a conversation, suffer from a delusion that the internet offers them a way to reach only the people who agree with them. Organizations like this assume users will happily provide the fig leaf of popular engagement, without any of that messy unpredictability that comes from offering actual people actual choices.
We can only be thankful that their failures have been as dramatic as these, though we have to be on the lookout for attempts to make the net more predictable, rather than making the AFA's and Radio 4's of the world more accountable. As Mr. Pound, the British MP, said when the results of his poll came in "We will have to re-evaluate the listeners of Radio 4," as if the people should answer to the pollsters, and not vice versa.
1. mattw on January 24, 2004 5:51 AM writes...
A while ago, I posted about what happened when the BBC’s Radio 4 tricked a Member of Parliment into proxying his legislative capabilities to an anonymous group of internet voters.
The official Today programme vote results show that the internet votes (less than a third of total votes) were roughly split between 3 of the 5 laws; the telephone votes were also split, but much more in favour of the embarrassing/unexpected result.
Just wanted to get that in before the story stops being an example of why not to pre-empt the public, and starts being an urban legend about the perils of internet voting.
The rumours of an organised lobby for that law are also denied by the Today programme, although I can't find an online reference from this. I heard in an interview that the late rally for the eventual winner (which started the lobby theory) was actually because the telephone votes were added near the end.
I do find it hard to believe that the editors of Today didn't know what they were getting into: large, public phone votes to decide game show outcomes are commonplace on TV, and the Today programme's own Listener's Law this year is there because the MP of the Year competition in previous years was being gamed by organised groups (an unusual volume of call votes from the Houses of Parliament area, I think is what they said) -- I'm sure they're quite adept at both handling unexpected outcomes and manipulating the broadcast output to favour the outcome they'd prefer.
Permalink to Comment2. coolaworld on April 21, 2004 3:19 PM writes...
Online voting/poll systems can be manipulated very easily, without need of any tools, just use your friends. But in my opinion is polling on the internet not even a tool for these things. These polls are not controleable. e.g. I do a written poll/questionaire for a company, then I know how much people will answer, because there can't be much more then duplicates I made for it. And with the internet this is not possible to check, because everybody can access the page and fill in whatever they want. Some people make it just like if it's a sport.
So if you want to get good results, you better take the test in the old way, even if you need to go door by door. Then the fake results will be going down, because when you do it personal, people don't like to start faking things up to give just an answer.
Here in Belgium, we had this week the same thing, a law want's to change some ticketfee's and a carmagazine placed an on line poll/petition, yesterday they took it off line, because the result was forged.
You'll see, it happens almost every time and they seem never to learn it.
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