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Status anxiety

How (and why) we lie to ourselves about opinion polls

Those who tweet favourable results aren’t trying to make them more likely; it’s something else

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the results of the YouGov daily tracker poll due to be published in the following day’s Sun. Some of them are neutrals, but the majority are politically aligned and will only tweet those results that show their party in front.

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Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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