Thursday, April 29, 2010

YouGov tries to close Craig Murray's blog. Let's go for another Streisand effect.

YouGov are trying to use the libel laws to close down Craig Murray's excellent blog because he uncovered some dodgy practices in their polling of the last leadership debate.

Here you can see the letter her received from the libel  lawyers, which is Not for Publication. If it gets taken down, ask me for a copy. It helpfully carries all of Craig's postings.

So in case the thought police do succeed in stifling free speech over on Craig's blog, I copy and paste a three of the offending pages:
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April 24, 2010

How YouGove Fixed Debate Poll

I have been unmasking the sleazy Murdoch propaganda vehicle that is YouGove, founded by the current Tory candidate for St Albans, and whose Chief Executive Officer is "Sleazy Stephan" Shakespeare, close friend and former PR adviser of Jeffrey Archer, failed Tory parliamentary candidate in Colchester (where he was unexpectedly beaten by the Lib Dem, explaining his huge bitterness towards them), and co-founder of Conservative Home website.
Michael Crick has revealed how YouGove fixed the instant poll after the last leaders' debate. This was an internet poll taken between just 9.27pm and 9.31 pm. Which means that, voting opened immediately after David Cameron finished his closing statement without waiting for the other candidates' closing statements. Voting closed just after Nick Clegg's closing statement got started.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/michaelcrick/2010/04/polling.html
This poll enabled YouGove's main customer Murdoch's Sky News to shrill an instant victory for Cameron, ignoring all the other Clegg victory polls that were taken after he had had a chance to give his closing speech.
YouGove is a disgrace.

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April 23, 2010

A tweet from the Sun:
Sun_Election Tonight’s Sun/YouGov poll reveals that Nick Clegg has failed to repeat his poll surge after the second leaders debate…
The anti-Lib Dem campaigning by Murdoch is so blatant it is really not funny. Now when they release the figures for their daily poll, the LibDems are the only party who have increased their vote share on the day before.
Tory 34, LD 29 (up 1), New Labour 29
This was the first opinion poll taken after the hounds of hell of the entire Tory media were released on Nick Clegg yesterday. How Murdoch must be frustrated at the loss of his iron grip on British public opinion. Expect new heights of hysterical Tory attack in the week ahead.
I now have a source within YouGove who tells me that in fact the poll showed the LibDems in the lead and Con on 30, but that was before "adjustment".
YouGove, you have some disgruntled employees. Again if you want to deny this, I will publish your denial. There have been visits to this site from the YouGove server all day.
A roundup of some brilliant dissections of media bias here.
http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/2010/04/23/friday-links-23410-the-arseoisie/#comments
I didn't realise it was the great Justin who invented #nickcleggsfault.
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YouGov Push Polling

YouGov spluttered and denied push polling in response to my exposure of their push polling.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/04/sky_leaders_deb.html
Where did they publish their denial? Conservative Home!!!!! Entirely appropriate, in fact.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/04/the-shakespeare-report-message-testing-v-push-polling.html
Here is what Mr Shakespeare, Chief Executive of YouGov, says:
Push-polling is a very different beast. Push-polling is unethical. Push-polling is conducting a poll to influence a respondent for some particular purpose. Mainly it is when people are pretending to conduct a poll, but actually they are contacting hundreds of thousands of people to repeat attack lines – it’s campaigning masquerading as polling, and in New Hampshire it’s even illegal (and quite right too). Another variant of push-polling (at least that’s how the phrase is often used) is when you ask ‘questions’ designed to influence the outcome of a poll. For example, if I ask you to choose which you like best from a list of positive attributes about a candidate and then ask you who you would want to vote for.
Message testing is an extremely valuable and reasonable form of research. Push-polling of any kind is plain wrong. YouGov, like all members of the British Polling Council, does lots of message-testing, and zero push-polling.
I hope that’s clear.
Have a close look at Stephan Shakespeare

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  One interesting feature of the YouGov poll was its use of push-polling, where they put a series of leading points to the pollee. Here is YouGov's page of biasing questions:


 Click the image if it is too small. Not everyone polled got this page.

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