‘Go F*ck Yourselves!’ Nate Silver Unleashes on Polling Company That Admitted It’s Fake

Pollster Nate Silver sent a clear message to those behind a polling outfit that admitted it was pushing fake stats as a sort of social experiment: “go f*ck yourself.”

On the Still Counting podcast, Silver, Galen Druke, and Clare Malone dove into the drama surrounding Wedgewood Polling, which had become a somewhat influential polling destination until the people behind it admitted it was all bogus. They claimed the experiment was to expose the dangers in modern polling and reporting.

“Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source,” Wedgewood posted to X.

The admission dropped just as the outlet was about to be exposed for pushing fake data.

“I say go f*ck yourselves. I hope you’re put in jail,” Silver said, though he added he did not mean what he was saying “literally.”

Silver argued that “people on Twitter are sometimes too kind to these enterprising college kids or whatever they are that start doing these kind of polls that are even at best kind of mediocre.”

He added that pushing “knowingly false information” is likely “still protected speech in a constitutional sense,” but he noted there could be major problems for the fake pollsters, especially since they crowdfunded some polls.

Silver argued fake pollsters can be motivated by manipulating prediction markets or simply having some kind of narrative power over specific elections.

“If you’re doing these sort of narrative-setting polls then maybe you are buying positions on prediction markets and then the line goes up and you cash them out or whatever else… or you have a political agenda,” he said.

Watch above via Still Counting.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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