Governing by poll has become a regular gambit for Musk. It promotes his vision of X as a public town square where important decisions are made, and — at least in theory — gives him actual information about what people think. He asked X users whether judges who rule against “the will of the people” should be impeached, and whether DOGE should audit the IRS. (More than two years ago Americans got a preview of this tactic when Musk used a poll to justify his decision to bring then-former President Donald Trump back to the platform.)
For all the debate about whether Musk is or is not some kind of “shadow president,” secretly wielding unchecked power — and all the gossip about where he stands in the never-ending court drama of the Trump White House — his use of X as a would-be legitimizing force points to how he really uses that power. He creates a feedback loop with the platform he owns, to justify any governing decision he wants to make.
Internet polls have always been viewed as highly unreliable in stats and the fact that he owns the platform and it has a very fucking obvious slant means it’s complete bullshit.
Reject obvious propaganda!
It’s also non-Americans and bots. Probably giving the FSB thousands of votes in every poll!
Well-designed internet polls can be very useful for some purposes but these are very obviously not well designed.
It is very difficult to actually run a generic random sample in an internet based poll - as long as the study being run has a specific internet based population of interest then it is possible but otherwise there’s just too many contrary variables that’ll pollute your results.