Janice R. Andrews
Mark Cuban, a wealthy businessman and “Shark Tank” star, recently made headlines with a social media poll that compared former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. This is a surprising turn in the story of the 2024 presidential election. Cuban’s question has caused discussion about both the candidates and the analytics of social media sites, which has made the future election even more difficult.
Public opinion studies have been closely watched as the 2024 election heats up. Trump is now the GOP candidate and Harris is now the Democratic nominee after President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21. But Cuban’s latest poll, which was done on X (formerly Twitter), has become a source of debate and interest.
“Whose personality and character would you like to see young children grow up to have?” Cuban asked on X on Friday. A total of 804,173 votes were cast, and the poll showed that Trump had 68.9% of the vote to Harris’s 31.1%. In an election year with a lot of close and often controversial survey data, this finding stands out.
But Cuban wasn’t just interested in the poll results. On Sunday, he asked why there was a difference between the number of votes and the participation data that X gave. Cuban told Elon Musk, the owner of X, that even though the poll had 804,000 votes, the statistics showed that only 656,000 people were actually interested in it. Cuban’s question about this difference caused a lot of conversation and brought attention to the data on the site and how they might affect how people see things.
“Hey @elonmusk @nypost, how come there were 804k votes for the poll, but only 656k engagements in the analytics?” Cuban asked about X. He sent a picture of his question to Grok, X’s AI robot that Musk created in 2023. The difference kept happening even after Grok confirmed that poll answers are counted as contacts.
Since Elon Musk bought X in 2022, it has gone through a lot of changes. The staff has been cut, some writers have been temporarily banned, and users who had been banned have been allowed back in. Musk’s launch of Grok, which was meant to make it easier for users to connect, has been full of problems. In a message sent to Musk in early August, five secretaries of state said that Grok was being criticized for spreading false information about the race.
According to the Associated Press, officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington were worried about Grok’s spread of false information about when state elections were due. The letter pointed out that wrong dates were widely shared on social media, which could have misled voters and affected the fairness of the election.
“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the secretaries of state wrote.
The problems with X and how it handles polls and fake news happen at a very important time in the 2024 presidential race. As the election draws near, social media sites are being closely watched to see how well they handle user exchanges and provide correct information.
Not only does Cuban’s question about the poll’s participation metrics show how hard it is for X to keep their analytics open and correct, but it also shows larger worries about how social media affects political conversation. As the election date gets closer, there will be more pressure on both the candidates and the venues where they talk about these problems in public. This is to make sure that voters get accurate information.
To sum up, Mark Cuban’s latest social media poll that compared Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has started a discussion about how accurate and open social media statistics are. As X deals with problems related to its AI robot and its part in spreading false information about the election, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to how social media sites track and report engagement data. As the 2024 election draws near, these events show how important it is to be careful about how we measure and share public opinion.**
