Shaken after his loss in the first presidential debate to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and his campaign surrogates grasped onto the only positive news they could find--instant online snap polls that seemed to show Trump had won.

On Twitter, Trump quickly set the tone for his surrogates as they flooded the airwaves during the following days news cycle, using the post-debate night snap polls as proof that it was actually Trump who had won in the minds of the public, not Clinton. Not only did Trump win, they claimed, but these online polls proved an even more important point: the media are biased in favor of Clinton and have it out for Trump.

Despite the widespread consensus among reporters and political analysts that Clinton bested Trump in the debate, journalists were left to defend against snap poll wielding Trump surrogates who insisted otherwise. Two days after the debate, MSNBC s Chuck Todd clashed with Trump campaign surrogate Jason Miller over this very issue, becoming visibly agitated at Millers insistence that post-debate online polls proved Trump had won:

MILLER: Well I have to set you straight on that one. The polls that happened that night, the night of the debate, the snap polls, the ones that happen online, those all showed Mr. Trump winning in a huge way.

TODD: What scientific poll had Donald Trump winning? Give me one scientific poll. Those are fan polls, man. Those are what computer programmers can mess with. Those aren't real.

What are online snap polls?

Online snap polls are one of those things that journalists hate, media companies love, and the public is largely unaware of. The internet and social media is full of them snap polls are instant online surveys open to anyone to vote in.

Online snap polls are not the same as a real scientific poll, which must have a statistically significant sample size and most importantly, be based on random sampling (along with other controls like weighting for demographics). Scientific polling is expensive and time consuming.

Online snap polls are gimmicks designed for user engagement.

Who Should Get Custody, Brad or Angelina? Will you buy the new iPhone 7? Online snap polls are everywhere. News media sites use them frequently, not for their news value but as a clickable piece of interaction to keep users engaged.

Who doesnt mind taking a second to click and vote in a poll?

When news outlets were trying to expand their web presence in the early 2000s, some started including online snap polls to encourage user engagement, or even just to showcase the newness and excitement of interactive news on the internet.

They might be fun, and normally online snap polls are little more than harmless clickbait, but when it comes to politics, they are a microcosm of the worst tendencies of election coverage.

Snap polls have little value in measuring real opinions.

This cant be emphasized enough: online snap polls dont measure anything useful, especially when it comes to politics. They are opt-in and basically just reflect whoever happened to stumble upon the poll. They can easily be gamed and voted in multiple times by refreshing a web browser, or even hacked and swamped with votes by a bot program.

Online snap polls might reflect the views of users of a particular site, such as the Drudge Report snap poll below taken after a 2016 Democratic primary debate, which says more about the rightwing, anti-Hillary mania of Drudge readers than anything meaningful about how the general public might have perceived the debate.