German Online Survey on Tesla stopped after irregularities
t-online.de
t-online.de
Translation:
According to a T-Online[1] survey, hardly any Germans still want to buy Teslas. But suddenly the number of participants exploded. T-Online stops the survey.
100k people took part in a non-representative t-online survey last week - within just a few days. The question was: "Would you still buy a Tesla car?" The result was clear on March 11th: around 94 % of participants said "Absolutely not". In contrast, only around 3 % of participants chose "Yes, no problem".
Just one week later, the result looks different - and the number of participants has exploded. 467k people had voted by Tuesday evening (as of March 18th, 17:00 o'clock). Suddenly, around 70 % of survey participants want to buy a Tesla - the proportion saying "no way" has fallen to 29 %.
It was initially unclear where these votes - and the sudden change in opinion - came from. At first glance, the number of article views in the past few days and the number of survey participants do not match. Initial in-house research now shows that 253k of the votes cast came from just 2 IP addresses in the USA. This points to the possibility that the survey may have been manipulated.
Furthermore, T-Online noticed that the link to the evaluation article and thus to the survey was shared thousands of times on Twitter and other social networks. On Tuesday evening, Tesla boss Musk himself shared the article with the new, more pleasing result for him.
Musk's post collected 2,8 million views on Twitter within the first two hours. Since then, the number of hits on the survey has increased noticeably once again. On Tuesday evening, there were several hundred per minute. T-Online has stopped the survey until further notice and removed it from the relevant articles.
[1] it still could be a hijacked device from a botnet or else, yadayada, but still