You don’t need hi-tech fake video.
I can make up a name such as “International Surveys/Global Media Polling” and fake up a bunch of numbers to prove that, oh say Trump loses by 20 points against Pete Buttjudger. I make up all the internals so anyone who tries to analyze it can’t tell that the data was all made up, no one was called or actually surveyed. I push it out to all the blog sites which have no standards for verification but are hungry for content, as well as on social medial and before long someone will have it posted right here on FR and people will be commenting on it without regard for whether it is true or not.
Happens every day. I can’t prove the polls are faked but no one can prove they aren’t, either. It is unproveable. You rely on trust every time you read a poll, trusting that the company has the integrity to report actual poll results that have not been made up or adulterated. People worry about internals, and cross tabs, and sampling error but fail to ask the more fundamental question: is this even real?
You make a good point about fake polls. But in many cases you don’t even have to fake the numbers. All you have to do is slant the question a certain way, and you’ll get the results you want.
The gun control folks are particularly good at that.
Seriously, all polls are BS because the basic premise of polls is BS.
We are told that “more than 50%” of 330 MILLION Americans think this-a-way because 26 people out of 50 polled answered thusly to 10 carefully contrived questions.
Fact is, the people polled will answer yay or nay. The result always has a 50% possibility of being right or wrong, and we can’t know if the *prediction* was correct until after the event has come to pass.