Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll
The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.
The poll, which asked the somewhat leading question “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue”, attracted ridicule from many within the Twitter community leading to, at one point a 96% vote in favour of the proposition.
Brighton-based senior lecturer in experimental psychology Dr Sam Hutton contacted Journalism.co.uk today to reveal that there was also an email campaign among UK-based psychologists who, as part of their jobs, take questionnaire neutrality seriously.
“One reason I think there were so many yes votes was because a psychologist got hold of it, and sent an email which quickly got copied to virtually every psychologist in the country, suggesting that we all vote yes as a way of protesting against such a ludicrously loaded question (psychologists care about questionnaire design),” Dr Hutton said.
“It clearly worked – it was actually 96% YES when I looked, but the server was struggling, and they have removed the poll completely now. A nice example of an online newspaper getting it wrong…”
This is the email that Dr Hutton, and psychologists all over the UK, received:
Here is an excellent example of how to phrase a neutral question from our friends at the Daily Mail… for all those interested in questionnaire design:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/polls/poll.html?pollId=1011506
Please do vote “yes”
Angered Twitter users have now vowed to take their campaign to all of the Daily Mail’s online polls, taking the opposite stance to the expected response, given the Mail’s reputation for having a ‘Middle England’ readership and an editorial line against what it sees as the liberal establishment.
Footnote: Readers from outside the UK might be also interested to read about the Mail’s history – in the 1930s it openly backed the British Union of Fascists, aka the Blackshirts.
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June 21st, 2009 at 12:52 am
Why have they spelt gypsies incorrectly?
June 21st, 2009 at 9:40 am
[...] However, the Twitter community was asking everyone to vote yes to skew the result. As a result, the Daily Mail pulled the poll – and all links now go their debate homepage. [...]
June 21st, 2009 at 9:41 am
[...] However, the Twitter community was asking everyone to vote yes to skew the result. As a result, the Daily Mail pulled the poll – and all links now go their debate homepage. [...]
June 21st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
[...] story has been picked up on blogs.journalism.co.uk with an article on Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll. Here I find that [...]
June 21st, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Many thanks for this post. I was engaged in the campaign on Twitter on Friday. My thoughts have just been published in a post on “Twitterers Subvert Dail Mail’s Racist Poll” on the UK Web Focus blog:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/twitterers-subvert-dail-mails-racist-poll/
June 21st, 2009 at 9:52 pm
People laugh at the Guardian and Telegraph as they push their opposite agendas. Mild and amusing stuff.
But do the people at the Daily Mail really appreciate how much people in the UK seriously dislike them?
June 21st, 2009 at 10:19 pm
[...] On the other hand, if you’d been primed by prolonged exposure to similar scare stories, your immediate response might be to realise that whoever phrased the question is out to play you and leap, mouse-finger twitching, to the defence of neutral survey phrasing and click a resounding “yes”. Word about the poll spread through Twitter, and concerned psychologist Sam Hutton pushed an email campaign: the poll was tracking at 90% plus in favour of queue-jumping gypsies before the Mail pulled it. [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:18 am
We must remember that the Daily Mail isn’t the canniest when it comes to the interweb. In 2001 its Chief Executive famously said that online news sites were not the place for breaking news……
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:35 am
[...] A wonderful “psychologists mug the Daily Mail” story from journalism.co.uk: [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:34 am
I am sure the Daily Mail are revelling in the extra attention and publicity. Brainless mass instinct does not always yield desirable results, as I am sure our friends at the polytechnic will agree.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 am
Interesting article about ‘loaded journalism.’ Of course your line about British fascists is strictly neutral and doesn’t skew things at all?
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:52 am
I’m guessing there’ll be a few Daily Mail journalists finding their way to this piece.
I just wanted to say, however much they are paying you, is it worth it?
Owners and editors have their own agendas but it’s about time journalists stopped accepting and promoting racism.
We can say what we like about the BNP but if you’re a Daily Mail journalist then you need to accept that you’ve done more to promote racial hatred than any small time skinhead with political pretensions.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
100% agree with steve jackson’s comment here
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
“Why have they spelt gypsies incorrectly?”
For the same reason that I can say everyone reading this should go out and bash the head in of some random seekh, or burn down some dew’s houses without fear of prosecution.
It’s a dodge to get round the race act (or something like that).
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:16 pm
@Harriet It’s not an article about ‘loaded journalism’ (I don’t use that phrase anywhere), it’s an observation about the perils of unscientific polling. And I think the Daily Mail’s history is important to the story because not all of our readers are UK-based and would understand the paper’s history and reputation.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Gypsy has historically had many different spellings. It’s a matter of newspaper house-style, not grammar.
Gipsy is another.
A gypsy woman told my mother, before I was born – “You got a boy child coming, gonna be a son of a gun.”
Romany gypsies/gipsies/ are devout catholics.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:10 pm
The Daily Mail makes my blood boil at times.. on a few occasions I have, politely, corrected some blatant factual errors in their web articles in the comments secsion, they have never once published them. They clearly only agree to post comments that align with their disturbed agenda.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I’m led to believe the derivation of Gypsy comes from the fact that the original gypsies came from Egypt therefore gypsy with a “y” makes most sense, unless of course Egypt has another spelling that I’m not aware of.
The Daily Mail is an awful rag. Why would anyone buy it? Andrex is far more absorbent.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I think the Gypsies should be allowed to sell lucky heather to people already in the queue.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Peter Hobday asked “But do the people at the Daily Mail really appreciate how much people in the UK seriously dislike them?”
Probably not. If they actually believe even 50% of the stuff they print, they’ll be too scared to leave the house and find out.
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Thanks Sean – I agree.
The Daily Mail’s political stuff probably goes right through the soft heads that read it anyway, without stopping.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:21 pm
[...] the Daily Mail poses. Anyway, long story short, some psychologists picked up on it as well, and apparently broke the website. I do wonder if the Mail just got scared and pulled the plug ’cause it wasn’t the [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 am
[...] Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail gypsy poll | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog (tags: twitter campaign dailymail) Posted by kaigani Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment » [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
[...] Via – Journalism.co.uk [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
[...] down for jobs heaves into view and I’m reminded at this point of what happened to the Daily Mail’s poll about gipsies last [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] Journalism.co.uk [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
[...] On Saturday June 20 Journalism.co.uk’s John Thompson reported: “The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.” [...]
July 1st, 2009 at 10:29 am
[...] it is at operating within new media than everyone else. A few days before it had gleefully reported how the web community had scuppered a particularly obnoxious Daily Mail poll (and I’ll confess to enjoying that too), now it was on a receiving end of something [...]
July 13th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
This would never have happened under the Tories.
July 31st, 2009 at 5:23 pm
[...] tell you the truth – because of embarrassment, malice or any of a number of other reasons. Gaming surveys has even become popular as a form of subversive act. The best possible example of this problem are [...]
August 14th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] a track record of running polls as ridiculous as “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?” The Daily Mail now run the risk of having a “left of centre” community of commenters [...]
August 14th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I think you’ll find that reddit had a hand in that one as well.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
[...] Via – Journalism.co.uk [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 12:17 am
[...] in general has been giving the inky press a bloody nose for some weeks – think about campaigns to skew biased newspaper polls or the continual outing of outright lies by Badscience and the like. The whole Jan Moir/Stephen [...]