Anadolu Agency refutes poll prediction allegations

By Ilkay Guder

ANKARA (AA) - Anadolu Agency never predicts poll results, but this year merely sent out test data to its subscribers as a trial run before the referendum, said the news agency’s information technology chief Wednesday.

"We only sent out test data to our subscribers that the system automatically created, so they could check their software," said Yakup Sivka, Anadolu Agency's IT director, hitting out at allegations that the agency sent out the referendum results a day beforehand.

On Tuesday daily Sozcu claimed that the agency had predicted the poll results, giving the 51.3 percent Yes vote results from the referendum. It alleged Anadolu Agency sent out test results at 5.34 p.m. local time (GMT1434) on April 15.

But Sivka responded that in fact “we didn’t send out test data to subscribers on that day,” April 15.

He added that there are "numerous mechanisms" that agency personnel use to enter the correct data into the system, which rejects any inconsistent data.

"If you analyze the data from our poll results website, you can see that it equals the correct number of voters with zero mistakes," Sivka said, adding that there had been many social media posts trying to discredit the agency’s data.

Sivka said Anadolu Agency uses a system that collects data from the ballot boxes and then immediately transfers the results to its system.

"Those numbers were collected in our system, enabling us to refresh our data every two minutes," he said.

He added that Anadolu Agency worked with Turkey’s state Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) to ward off cyber-attacks and with cellphone operator Turkcell to fight denial of service attacks.

"We managed to send out a total of 1,840 stories without the need for a correspondent," Sivka said. "The software we used collected the data and put it in a table, publishing in the format we designed."

The IT chief also said that on the evening of April 16, Anadolu Agency saw a total of 20 million page view requests and more than 3.5 million visitors.

"Our Twitter account saw 26 million page views, our Facebook page was seen 2.8 million times," he said. "A total of 924 IP addresses were blocked due to hack attacks."

Sivka added that hackers’ IP addresses mostly came from the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Brazil.