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Our investigation into allegations of data fabrication at the firm SoCal Strategies, and an alleged association with the admittedly fraudulent firm Wedgewood Polls, has resulted in the pollster wiping itself from the face of the earth. Full story at 50+1: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/more-polls...

FiftyPlusOne.news@fiftyplusone.news

NEWS: The website and social media accounts for pollster SoCal Strategies have been taken offline after FiftyPlusOne reached out to the firm Tuesday to verify data quality and potential ties to Wedgewood Polls, which admitted to fabricating data this week. blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/more-polls...

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digital privacy is important and "the right to be forgotten" gets deserved attention, but we need to also talk more about "the right to remember" and the epistemic imperative to protect ourselves from being gaslit by historical revisionists.

I'm not totally thrilled about @fiftyplusone.news having to be the poll police this week. But somebody has to do it, and our investigations have results. We have uncovered two admitted or likely fraudsters this week, and caught another manipulating its respondent-level data in August.

Basically, the FiftyPlusOne team now has extensive enough sourcing and the data chops that if you're doing bad shit with polls, we are going to find out about it.

If you keep forcing the major newspapers to issue retractions, maybe they'll finally start exerting some of their own quality control on what they repost and include in their stories. Force them to say over and over again that they used crap sources, and they might stop doing it.

On the contrary I think it rocks that someone gives enough of a shit to do this and that the someone is the aggregator I trust the most (a correlation which I suppose is not coincidental!)

I suspect there will be many more. Claude makes it possible to spin up a convincingly deep website in an hour or two. I don't trust anything new, anymore. If someone doesn't have quality work from before 2025 to lend credibility, I have to assume it might be a machine's hallucination.

I don't like what this means for young folks trying to establish a reputation for expertise or insight or hard work, but the internet now must be treated as a wholly adversarial propaganda network. Nearly always fake, nearly always pushing the agenda of a few billionaires.

"A shady pollster from sunny California" is a great, old-school newspaper turn of phrase. Like a line delivered by a hard-boiled fedora-wearing Humphrey Bogart in a noir film.