Bogus Tesla Polls Are Bogus

Via the US website Electrek, which does news about electric vehicles and adjacent subjects, a story about bogus polls.

A bogus online clicky poll in Germany got 100,000 clicks and found that 94% of the time that a button was clicked, it corresponded to “absolutely not willing to buy a Tesla”.  Electrek calls this “100,000 Germans”, based on very little evidence.

The poll kept running.  By the time it had 470,000 clicks, only 29% of the clicks corresponded to “absolutely not willing to buy a Tesla”.  Quite a lot of these clicks — 253,000 — came from just two IP addresses in the US. A bit of maths shows that the clicks from the two US addresses made up about three-quarters of the pro-Tesla clicks.

The magazine, T-Online, was forced to the shocking conclusion that its meaningless customer-engagement exercise had been manipulated by someone else’s meaningless customer-engagement exercise.

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