Not a single major news org ran this story that I could find.

You mean to tell me X is peddling disinformation? Shocker. Muskrats prefer marshes and swamps after all.

Here’s the problem. This is the internet.

These are locally run and often volunteer based instances.

Anyone can spawn any amount of accounts and run their instance however they’d like, giving lots of trolls neat little nooks to hide in.

You’re expecting to get real results? How did you account for multiple votes? How are you even sure that the data from the polls if unique, is accurate?

Garbage in. Garbage out. People will use Lemmy if they want to. End of story. Idk why everyone is so obsessed with inflating user counts