subscribeThe Alpha Course “Does God exist?” and online poll ethics
The Alpha Course in the UK are running a marketing campaign at the moment with posters asking the question “Does God exist?” followed by empty tick boxes for Yes/No/Probably. They’ve got the same thing on their homepage at http://uk.alpha.org/ set up as an online poll, complete with “see results so far” link.
Problem is..
Clicking yes always returns 36-34-30. Clicking no always returns 35-34-30. Clicking probably always returns 35-34-31.
The votes are being posted to and the “results” returned by http://uk.alpha.org/?q=/alpha09/poll&vote=[yes|no|probably] - view source to see the html returned with the “results”.
Amusingly you can get the stats as high as 40% “no” by adding lots of votes at once e.g. http://uk.alpha.org/?q=/alpha09/poll&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no&vote=no etc. see here: http://bit.ly/somethingfishygoingon
Of course as soon as you vote anything else the numbers return to normal.
Regardless of your religious beliefs, surely this is pushing the line a bit far in terms of presenting it as a real poll when the results are fixed?
I don’t mean this to be focused on religion. The interesting question to me is “is it legit to host an online poll backed by a significant ad campaign and present fake results?” If it helps, try imagining that this is a poll by some other brand asking “Do you think our product is the best?” and presenting you with what they make out to be what other people think.
Seems to me like this is deceiving the public. How do poll results (or not) relate to advertising standards laws? Is this legal?
Say e.g. Apple hosted an online “poll” asking “Are our laptops the best? Yes/No/Probably” with a “see results so far” link. Would that be “just publicity material”? Where would they stand legally?
Update
Unlike me, James wasn’t too lazy to actually e-mail the webmaster - apparently “the result were being cached - [they] didn’t notice as caching is disabled for registered users.”.
The site currently shows a large percentage of noes - hopefully as well as fixing the caching they also ensured that multiple votes in the style of http://bit.ly/somethingfishygoingon are not added to the total!
