Cease & Desist requests - one of the less travelled paths during the Obama v Clinton v McCain contest

It would appear that blogger allegations of Republican sexism and racism have entered the US presidential race, resulting in this little missive.

February 26, 2008

Sender Information:
SurveyU
Sent by: [Private]
[Private]
New York, New York, USA

Recipient Information:
[Private]
[Private]
New York, NY, 10009, USA

Sent via: Email
Re: Inaccurate article at http://jdel.tumblr.com/post/27338177

[Private],

We are SurveyU, authors of the survey reproduced in your post of February 26th at http://jdel.tumblr.com/post/27338177.
We are the sole author of the survey and received no payment or other consideration from any organization, including the one identified in your post, to create and distribute the survey. It is our intention to publicly release our analysis of the results.

We therefore request that you immediately amend the post to indicate those facts.

Without regard to your incorrect inferences as to whether this constitutes an attempt to architect attack strategies or create 'push polling', the survey uses a number of constructs commonly used by psychologists to measure attitudes toward race and gender (attached), and does not evidence any pre-determined bias or desired result. We used these constructs to attempt to measure whether race and gender are underlying motivators behind the voting intent of college students.

In a separate section of the survey a series of statements made by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were randomly assigned to one of the candidates or the other. This research technique is used to uncover any underlying bias that students have toward each candidate by seeing how the electability/appeal ratings differ when the same statement is attributed to each of the candidates.

Since you posted the article without any attempts to verify the accuracy ofyour information, we've gone out of our way to explain the survey methodology and intent to you, however, it appears that your motives are not to understand the research, but instead to draw attention to yourself.

SurveyU is proud of its use of scientific methods of gauging college students sentiment for the purpose of contributing to public discourse. We have produced a number of surveys for this purpose, all of which can be downloaded from http://www.surveyu.com/press_room.php

You are on notice that you have made false implications as to our motivations and our intent. We request that you either remove the post or reprint this letter in its entirety in the body of the post.

[Private]
Co-Founder SurveyU
--
[Private]
SurveyU - The Voice of the American Student

Copy of this request found at Chilling Effects along with a revealing secondary 'related link'.