Thread by @dogemperor

@JeanPodrasky As insane as it sounds, I *ALSO* think this is a reason why polling has skewed conservative (and that's well before garbage "narrative setting" polls come into the equation).

tl;dr the same people who answer phone polls tend to ALSO be marks for phishing and fraud

1/x

@JeanPodrasky So how this relates to polling--most polling is done either via cold-calls to phone lines *or* via online polling, frequently via "pay to poll" services that reward people monetarily for filling out surveys in a focus group (including political polls)

2/x

@JeanPodrasky Most people under 55 in general *do not* answer unsolicited phone calls (and younger generations, who are cell-only, even go to the point of whitelisting) *specifically* because unsolicited telephone calls from telemarketers are such a severe issue nowadays.

3/x

@JeanPodrasky And the history of this IS actually fairly recent, as well as the skew of unsolicited telephone calls to being almost *entirely* various types of phishing scams.

Up until 2003, about the only way to avoid telemarketers was to specifically ask to be put on a do-not-call list

4/x

@JeanPodrasky And, up to that point, cell phones were largely free of telemarketing calls--because the US laws did, and still do, ban telemarketing broadly to cell phones (it's treated under the same provisions as junk faxes).

In 2004, the national Do Not Call Registry went live.

5/x

@JeanPodrasky And after a number of enforcement actions by the FTC regarding violations of of the law re the Do Not Call Registry, this was the point that a lot of the more unethical telemarketers (claiming they were from Cardholder Services et al) started shifting offshore.

6/x

@JeanPodrasky As VoIP systems (particularly SIP based telemarketing) became more established, the call centers shifted from Florida first to Montreal, then to Belize, Mexico, India, and the Philippines (with phone numbers held by US based ILECs that served as "telcos for telemarketers")

7/x

@JeanPodrasky As action commenced against these ILECs, a lot of the telemarketing began shifting to outright forged caller-ID (in order to defeat early call block mechanisms that phone providers were starting to offer)

Which in turn has led to federal mandates for authentication

8/x

@JeanPodrasky And this ultimately resulted in SHAKEN/STIR becoming a standard (which is how your cell phone notes either "Verified number" or "Potential spam").

But it's still a serious enough issue, and over the past 30 years has shifted towards more blatant phishing attempts

9/x

@JeanPodrasky Even in the days before the national Do Not Call Registry, a lot of the telemarketing WAS of a skeevy nature (credit card offers, timeshare companies claiming people had won free vacations & cruises as a way to hook folks into a sales pitch, debt relief, and so on).

10/x

@JeanPodrasky And telemarketing abuse has been at least a partial driver for why most people under 55 years of age have a cell phone as their primary or only phone--the laws were always stricter re calls to cell phones, and there are more tools to block telemarketers & phishers.

11/x

@JeanPodrasky And nowadays, almost everyone under 55 likely has their phone in the national do-not-call registry, if they still have a landline probably use NomoRobo and CERTAINLY screen by Caller ID, and more likely they're cell-only and either whitelist or use callblocker apps

12/x

@JeanPodrasky Which means that phishing calls (which are the vast majority of telemarketing calls) now target a specific demographic: People over 65, using landlines, who are more likely to respond to a call from an unknown caller than younger, more phishing-savvy populations.

13/x

@JeanPodrasky Which is why a lot of telescams have shifted from credit relief scams to things like calls claiming issues with the IRS, or issues with Social Security payments, or Medicare supplemental insurance related scams, or "we'll buy your property", or spear-phishing

14/x

@JeanPodrasky Very often, rural or suburban populations are targeted in these calls, many older folks may not use CID to screen, some older folks (especially "empty nesters" who are widowed or widowers) will literally pick up the phone just to talk to people.

15/x

@JeanPodrasky And it is exactly these groups that are not just most prone to actually being "hooked" by a phishing call, but are also the most likely to vote conservative, are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by coercive groups...and also most likely to respond to phone polling.

16/x

@JeanPodrasky Likewise, people who participate in paid surveys also tend to be lower-middle class, often trend conservative, and are more generally likely to fall for online scams than the general population (and THIS seems to be cross-generational)

17/x

@JeanPodrasky The correlation between "Conservative voters" and "likely marks for various types of scams" is in fact something that pops up enough it's been a subject of study, including this study on belief in conspiracy theories and conservative voters

18/xncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

@JeanPodrasky And specifically, there are smaller subsets of conservatives that seem to be more likely to spread conspos online--one factor being "low levels of conscientiousness", or put more simply, doing less fact-checking.
psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-96…
politico.com/news/magazine/…

19/x

@JeanPodrasky Other studies have also shown that conservatives (particularly of the "posting MAGAt stuff on main" variety) are generally worse at distinguishing truths from falsehoods, again pointing to low conscientiousness

20/xscience.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@JeanPodrasky And the phenomena has been noted in not just the US but other countries, and amounts to "People who vote conservative and get pulled in by MAGAtism are quite possibly easier marks in general".

21/xarchive.is/cZB1L

@JeanPodrasky And--of particular note to Pravda Social *and* phone calls--the correlation appears to be specifically with people who *share* misinfo/disinfo online, because they're generally poor at evaluating the "truthiness" and often posting out of emotion

22/xapnews.com/article/c2e751…

@JeanPodrasky And there's actually *another* cultural phenomena where this comes up, has been actually noted by psychologists, and *also* involves derailing "truth detectors" in favor of emotional highs:

Coercive religious groups.



23/xthreadreaderapp.com/thread/1543971…

@JeanPodrasky Many people in TFG's "base" are members of coercive religious movements that have only fairly recently been widely recognized as coercive (like the New Apostolic Reformation or Falun Dafa) or are in highly abusive new religious movements (like QAn*n related stuff).

24/x

@JeanPodrasky This phenomena also applies to political cults of personality (and at least some experts on coercive religious groups DO consider MAGAtism a true political cult of personality), and hate groups *also* have very similar characteristics to coercive religious groups.

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@JeanPodrasky And quite a lot of coercive religious movements are, in and of themselves, a source of grifting--Prosperity Gospel, which had its origins within the movement that became the New Apostolic Reformation, is itself more than a bit of a religious grift.

26/x

@JeanPodrasky Many folks have outright compared Trump to the old snake-oil sellers; I have myself directly compared him, right down to specific *cadences* in speech, to televangelists

But, again, there's an even deeper mechanic going on here that IS related.

27/x

@JeanPodrasky Coercive groups, as I noted in my last link, tend to not only derail "truth-testing" by keeping people on highs of emotion to short-circuit logical thinking, but *also* push a massive "in-group vs out-group" mentality, which often leads to "trust abuse" in these groups.

28/x

@JeanPodrasky One of the things that has come out in the past decade or so within the ex-NAR #exvangelical community is that there is a *shocking* amount of sexual abuse (including minors) committed by major figures and covered up--again, due to pastors & deacons abusing trust.

29/x

@JeanPodrasky There is also a MASSIVE amount of what has been termed "affinity fraud" that has targeted Christian Nationalists for decades, arguably from the start of MLMs (like Amway) up to the present which is *separate* from the preachers' hustles

30/xthreadreaderapp.com/thread/1801667…

@JeanPodrasky New Apostolic Reformation and LDS communities have in fact been so consistently targeted by various forms of affinity fraud *in part* because fraudsters specifically target these groups who are more likely to trust someone saying they're "Christian"

31/x

@JeanPodrasky So for DECADES you have had MLMs, you've had actual Ponzi schemes (often portrayed as "Christian Gifting"), you've had goldbuggerie schemes, you've had promotion of sovereign-citizen "redemption" schemes, outright grifts for Israel related "investments", and so on

32/x

@JeanPodrasky And more recently, you've had the same folks promoting goldbuggerie promoting those Dunning-Krugerrands Made Of Arbitrarily Complex Math On A Ledger, you've had them engaging in Iraqi dinar schemes, "Gaza strip oil prospecting", schemes to breed red heifers, etc.

33/x

@JeanPodrasky And occasionally you'll have them actually attempt to grift each OTHER--with "oil dowsers" grifting NAR churches, or with churches trying to get out of broadcast fees for televangelist networks with signed "Holy Land" Bibles

Affinity fraud is RIFE

34/x

@JeanPodrasky And a gain, it's a phenomena of how the in-group is heavily trusted (and arguably trusted TOO much), the out-group isn't.

And it would appear that in *some* ways "marks" are more likely to trust and *not* verify, in other words.

35/x

@JeanPodrasky And this means that in phone *and* online polls it's more likely that MAGAts are going to respond (and people who are less trusting of cold callers or "pay for poll" services will NOT and are basically unpollable as a result).

36/x

@JeanPodrasky It ALSO means that Truth Social is pretty much a PERFECT playground for a scammer, because it's a whole site of potential marks who have *already* shown themselves susceptible to affinity fraud of various sorts (these are the folks buying the $60 "Trump Bibles" after all)

37/end

@JeanPodrasky @threadreaderapp unroll