A 21-year-old man has come forward as the architect of a fabricated polling operation that pushed fake surveys into the political media ecosystem, boosting socialist candidates in California and Wisconsin before the ruse collapsed this week.
Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday that he single-handedly created Median Strategies, a purported independent polling firm, as a “social experiment” to test whether fabricated polling data could gain traction in political coverage without being vetted. The admission came after Median withdrew all of its polling earlier this week and acknowledged the surveys were not real.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Prakash said, according to the Guardian. “And as it turned out, it could.”
The experiment’s real-world consequences were already in motion before Prakash revealed himself. One of Median’s fabricated polls showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading democratic socialist challenger Nithya Raman by 12 points in a mayoral race. Bass touted the result on social media before deleting the post once the operation was exposed as fraudulent.
Median also released fabricated polling that suggested socialist Francesca Hong was leading the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary by more than 20 points, as well as a survey showing Republican Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo ahead in his re-election race.
Prakash told the Guardian he was surprised by the speed with which the phony numbers were picked up and amplified. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own,” he said.
The operation initially presented itself with the trappings of a legitimate research outfit. Before the hoax was revealed, Median’s website described the organization as an “independent polling and research” firm and promised to help rebuild trust in polling. The Guardian linked Prakash to Median through domain registration records tied to the site. Prakash said he used artificial intelligence to build the website and was the only person behind the operation.
He acknowledged the damage the false data caused to candidates who were cited in the fabricated surveys. “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this,” Prakash said.
Polling industry pushes back
The American Association of Political Consultants rejected the framing of the hoax as a benign social experiment, saying it was “a deception directed at voters, at the press, and at the campaigns that rely on public data to make decisions.”
Prakash said his motivation was partly frustration with polling failures in the Michigan Senate primary, where pre-election surveys had substantially overstated Abdul El-Sayed’s eventual margin of victory.
Median’s abrupt withdrawal of its surveys earlier this week came with a statement claiming the operation was designed to examine how “purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
That framing did little to mollify critics who noted that real campaigns, voters, and journalists were left to sort out the consequences of the fabricated data.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/meet-the-fraud-pollster-who-boosted-socialist-with-fake-stats