...and statistics.

I wouldn't trust the BBC to speak my weight, but the online poll may be doing a continuous percentage update each time someone votes. if the total number of votes cast is small (like most people can't be bothered to vote in online polls) then someone can just cast a few dozen or a few hundred votes and distort the poll results until someone else logs on and casts slightly more votes for the other side.

Any poll in which the sample is self-selected (as in online polls, which sample only people already motivated to participate) will inevitably be skewed.

In addition, such polls are vulnerable to "freeping" (the practice of organized flooding of the poll by adherents of one particular viewpoint, often coupled with multiple voting by the freeping participants).

Really professional pollsters take considerable pains to ensure a properly randomized sampling of the population, along with endeavoring to avoid presenting questions in a way that would tend to lead the participant into a "desired" response (a matter generally overlooked or avoided by online polls) and even so, the pros get it wrong with depressing regularity.

Trying to raise general awareness of the unscientific nature of online polling, its use as a propaganda tool and the need for adequate doses of NaCl when considering them should be more desirable than wating time trying to influence them.

They poll you to guage public opinion, then they fabricate the result if it's not the response they hoped for and adjust media propaganda accordingly. This leads the sheople to go with the majority of the herd, like if 98% say the strike is wrong, then so will I.... Baaah, Baaah.

I dislike the word 'sheeple', as it implies that 'the masses' are stupid and weak-willed, which frankly is another divide-and-rule myth pushed by the rich and powerful.

Having said that.. I do agree that opinion polls play a crucial propaganda role, which is to do with confidence. It's not so much that people will decide to 'go along with' the stated majority, but that many people can be scared into silence if they can be convinced they are in the minority.

The BNP (see more recent news) are very clever at this game. They produce endless carefully constructed (or just downright made-up) polls showing that 'the silent majority' back them. Their real aim is to scare and thus silence anti-racists and anti-fascists.

Treat polls like any story or report; ask yourself, who is telling me this and why do they want me to believe it?

I hate it when people talk about media misinformation cos it's so much rubbish. only nutcases believe the media is systematically biased. ever noticed that it's not just the Left that talks about media bias? the Tories think the BBC is biased against them, so do the BNP, so do hunters, so does David Icke.

I noticed this poll. I thought it likely to be a case of spamming (by the government?). Why? Because it had the largest number of votes I'd seen on any poll - which would occur if you need to offset a lot of pro-strike votes. Alos I monitored the voting and noticed that there where about 20 votes per minute being logged which seemed ta littel high to me.