The polling firm YouGov actually polled Americans on questions Elon Musk had raised. His polls are not the vox of the populi, after all.
Soon after he took control of Twitter, the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk instituted an unexpected management mechanism: key decisions were suddenly being presented to the site’s users for final arbitration.
Should former president Donald Trump be returned to the platform? Users said yes, so — “vox populi, vox Dei,” as Musk liked to tweet! — he was back. Should previously banned accounts be granted amnesty? You bet! The populi had spoken!
Having seen prior examples of Twitter polls being taken seriously, I wrote at the time that the unscientific results of Musk’s surveys were not necessarily useful reflections of sentiment. Just because 15 million people weigh in, as happened with the Trump survey, that doesn’t make the results statistically significant.
But this was just rhetoric, an argument about such polls in general. It’s not like an actual pollster was replicating the results and allowing us to compare scientific polling with Musk’s surveys, right.
Wrong. YouGov did exactly that.
The results are fascinating. The pollsters took nine Musk tweets that included polls and recreated them within their polling system precisely. They even surveyed a statistically significant number of Twitter users, allowing us to compare the unscientific surveying of Twitter users on Twitter with the scientific assessment of the views of Twitter users off of Twitter. YouGov even asked whether respondents followed Musk, so we can compare the views of Musk’s follower base with the actual results of the surveys.
Before we walk through the results, there are some caveats.
