Key facts
- A 21-year-old college graduate, Rahil Prakash, created an anonymous website called Median Strategies.
- Median Strategies published fake election polls in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.
- The website shut down after its methodology was questioned by the Los Angeles Times.
- Prakash stated the project was a social experiment to see how fake polling spreads.
- The fake polls were shared on social media and cited by some news outlets, including the California Post.
- Prakash apologized to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong.
A 21-year-old recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash has been identified as the individual behind Median Strategies, an anonymous website that generated and disseminated widely shared fake election polls in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California. The website abruptly ceased operations and withdrew its data earlier this week following inquiries from the Los Angeles Times.
Prakash described his project as a "short-term social experiment" aimed at understanding how fabricated polling data could infiltrate the political information ecosystem without verification. He told The Guardian that he was motivated by a significant polling miss in the Michigan Senate primary, which inspired him to test his theory on the rapid spread of misinformation.
The fake polls were shared on social media platforms, including X, and cited by some news outlets. Notably, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass's campaign was mentioned in a poll that purportedly showed her ahead by over 10 percentage points. The poll was also cited by the California Post. However, several credible polling organizations declined to aggregate Median's data due to an inability to verify its methodology.
Prakash admitted he did not anticipate the speed at which the fake polls would be adopted by the press. He has since apologized to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong, who were subjects of the fabricated data. The American Association of Political Consultants condemned the effort, labeling it a "deception directed at voters, at the press, and at the campaigns."