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Adam Berinsky

Adam Berinsky

Professor

Aug 17, 2026

5:47
Is that true? Or are online polls just as good as a telephone poll?
5:54
Well, I mean, it depends on the pollster.
5:55
So there's good polls and bad polls, and there's good phone polls and bad phone polls, same thing with internet polls.
6:01
I think what you want to be suspicious of is, you know, sort of places that conduct internet polls that are kind of like, you know, so when I was young, there used to be like call-in polls, like we'd dial 1-900 numbers to get your voice heard.
6:14
And there's a lot of internet polls that are like that these days, where you have people who are asking their audiences, you know, vote on how you feel about this.
6:23
So, you know, I teach a polling class to undergraduates at MIT and graduate students as well, but sort of talk about, you know, showing them some potential problems with different polls, right? And I show them a poll from 2022 that asks, how do you feel about Joe Biden? And 99% of the respondents say he's a terrible president.
6:44
And then I show them, you know, so should we trust this? And then I show them that actually it was a poll that was conducted on BillOReilly.com, right? And so it's, of the people who, you know, follow Bill O'Reilly on the internet, 99% of the people don't like Biden, but it doesn't mean that 99% of the public doesn't like Biden.

17 MINS LATER

24:18
Do you find that in your research? Is that true?

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