The results of its survey “should not be treated as genuine polling data,” announced Median Strategies last week.

For good reason. As the organization went on to say, the poll it released earlier, showing how well candidates were faring in several races, was fake.

Median Strategies admitted that it had fabricated the polling results as part of a “short-term social experiment” meant to expose how quickly false information could spread.

(Some creative vandal might want to try using “just a short-term social experiment” to excuse his breaking a neighbor’s home’s window and scrawling graffiti on its front door. I’m guessing it wouldn’t work out well for him.)

What the pollster at issue evidenced (though probably not the best word to use here), before the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor took place, was that Francesca Hong was leading her opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, by more than 20 percentage points.

That would have meant that the “progressive” Ms. Hong’s victory would surpass even that of fellow radical Abdul El-Sayed in neighboring Michigan’s U.S. Senate race. Which, were it reality, would surely further energize the radical part of the Democratic party.

Thankfully, Ms. Hong went on to lose, although by less than one percentage point. Six days later, Median Strategies owned up to its subterfuge.

Another “survey result” by the firm showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading her opponent Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff. Repeated inquiries by the Los Angeles Times about the methodology of that claim were what led the polling group to come clean.

And to explain that the fabricated results were intended only to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Unsurprisingly, the false polls, particularly the one from the California race, spread widely through social media. The much-maligned “major media,” to their credit, largely ignored the purported polling results, since Media Strategies did not respond to any of their questions about the supposed survey’s methodology.

Even traditional surveys conducted by experienced pollsters have gotten things wrong many times. A week before the aforementioned Michigan Senate Democratic primary election, legitimate polls showed Mr. El Sayed leading by a large margin; his victory, in the end, was a very narrow one.

But a totally phony survey released as real into the mediasphere is something new, and bound to add to public distrust of polls.

The reaction to Median Strategies’ “experiment” was predictably, and rightly, negative, with many pundits accusing the firm of election interference. And, indeed, fictitious “results” presented by pollsters can easily lead to voters either being complacent or feeling hopeless, and, in either case, not bothering to vote. It can also lead some people (and they are both many and mindless) to vote for whomever they perceive as “a winner.”

My personal reaction to Median Strategies’ is less a feeling of outrage than of puzzlement.

If there were a rating system for utterly pointless experiments, at the very top of the heap would be one designed to show “how purported… information could enter and spread through the.. information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Uh, have the folks at Median been following what regularly enters and spreads through the information ecosystem without independent verification… about Israel? Or Jews?

Like the widespread contention that Israelis celebrated (or were behind) the 9/11 attacks; or that the “Zionist war-machine” (i.e. Israel) forced President Trump to attack Iran; or that Israel seeks to exterminate the residents of Gaza. Or that shark attacks in the Red Sea were remotely controlled by Israel to harm Egypt’s tourist industry.

Or that “the Jews” created COVID-19, orchestrated the assassination of JFK and the murder of Charlie Kirk or used their “space lasers” to create hurricanes. Or that Jews were behind the wildfires that plagued Europe this summer.

And so, Median Strategies’ seeking to ascertain if falsehoods can find a fertile growth medium in the muck of the internet – the source of “information” for countless people with strong typing fingers but weak mental faculties – is a little (no, a lot) like seeking to ascertain whether apples grow on trees, hens lay eggs or the sun rises in the east.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine