What to know about the fake election poll numbers shared and retracted by a mysterious company

NEW YORK (AP) — Locked in a competitive reelection race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was evidence that her campaign was "gaining momentum." Just a few days later, the truth emerged: The poll was fabricated. The California results were among at least three "polls" across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it "was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification." The post offered no explanation of who was behind the "experiment" or for what purpose. The trajectory of the California poll offers a cautionary tale about the perils of trusting unvetted polling. Median's "findings" were shared by polling aggregation accounts on social media.

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