The Star Accused of Manipulating Online Polls | Malaysiasaya

According to The Star that on Monday evening, The Star online already put up a poll on the proposed Bersih 2.0 rally on this July 9.

The poll already asked for their opinion on should it be cancelled or should it be allowed to go on.

Just less than a day, it drew more than a million responses which caused the team to suspect that the results were being manipulated and The Star polls attract an average of not more than 30,000 responses over several day.

Beside that the total number of unique visitor to The Star Online is about 400,000 per day, lending further credence to our suspicion that there was manipulation afoot.

If using in several ways this could be done very easily, for example through scripted routines or “bots” that comes in to a site to perform the same task over multiple repetitions.

An initial examination of four site logs showed about one million submissions to the poll page from just one IP address.

Therefore, acting upon the belief that the poll results were tainted, we made the decision to take it offline just before noon Tuesday.

They regret that they effort to give the public a voice has been tainted by the act. -The Star