Troll armies rig polls to deceive you into believing Trump won first debate
The bogus polls were cited by Trump, Hannity, and Limbaugh.
A scientific CNN/ORC poll conducted after Monday night’s presidential debate found that Hillary Clinton won by a 62 percent–27 percent margin. That result was corroborated by Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s focus group.
So you might’ve been surprised to see Donald Trump gloating today about dominating last night’s proceedings, citing unscientific online polls as proof.
The polls Trump cites were unscientific — they allowed anybody anywhere to participate, regardless of whether they’re likely to vote in November or are even an American citizen. Not only that, but according to numerous reports, the results of many of them were rigged by Trump-supporting internet troll armies.
The Daily Beast reports that posts on 4chan and 8chan attempted “to game online polls soliciting opinions on who won the debate, imploring users to ‘abuse airplane mode toggling’ to allow for more votes for Trump on websites like CNBC, Time, ABC News, and CNN.”
The Daily Beast report refers to this tweet:
The unscientific CNBC poll listed at the top of the 4chan post featured in the screencap was later touted by Trump.
Bogus polls shaping public perception
Trump, who has made unfounded concerns about election rigging a centerpiece of his campaign, wasn’t the only one citing the bogus online polls as evidence he actually won the debate. As Business Insider reports, shortly after the debate, Sean Hannity was gloating about them to his millions of viewers on Fox News.
“I have it in front of me. Time magazine, Drudge Report, CNBC, The Hill, CBS — the only one that has Hillary winning is CNN, and they are the ‘Clinton News Network,’” Hannity said.
Hannity also suggested the unscientific polls were actually more accurate than CNN’s scientific survey.
“Everyone refuses to call Sean Hannity.”thinkprogress.org
“[T]hese other ones have hundreds of thousands if not millions,” Hannity said, contrasting the online polls with CNN’s sample size of 521.
Hannity continued to brag about the online polls during his radio show on Tuesday. Rush Limbaugh also cited them on Tuesday as evidence Trump won the debate.
Russia connection
Tuesday morning, Trump bragged about Twitter’s top trend being the #TrumpWon hashtag.
A few hours later, freelance writer Dusty Giebel tweeted a screencap of Trendsmap.com data showing that the #TrumpWon hashtag primarily emanated from VPNs in the St. Petersburg, Russia area.
Giebel told ThinkProgress he was following 4chan last night and noticed that many posters were writing “with Cyrillic language syntax and rhythm,” so he wasn’t shocked when he pulled the Trendsmap data this morning.
Though his screencap only shows the St. Petersburg area, Giebel said roughly 85 percent of the #TrumpWon activity came from VPNs in that area of the world.
“I will tell you up until last night I never bought into the ‘Russian troll’ idea, but looking at that motivated me” to take it seriously, Giebel said.
While the location of VPNs doesn’t necessarily correlate with where an internet user is physically located, the Guardian reported last year about a building in St. Petersburg that “has been identified as the headquarters of Russia’s ‘troll army’, where hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications with remarks praising the president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the depravity and injustice of the west.”
The Trump campaign’s ties with Russia have come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of Yahoo reporting last Friday that federal investigators are looking into Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page’s meetings with high-ranking Russian officials this summer. During a news conference in July, Trump brazenly encouraged Russian hackers to “find” tens of thousands of emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s server, adding that media coverage would result in the hackers being “rewarded mightily by our press.” Last Thursday, the top Democrats on the intelligence committee pinned recent hacks of voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois on Russian intelligence.