The brief message contained a link to the poll, which asked the simple question: "Should Australia take part in a war against Iraq?"
By yesterday afternoon, 57,000 votes had been registered, with 90 percent of respondents answering "no".
But Anita Pugliese, a senior research director with polling giant Gallup, says that although the number of respondents is nothing short of massive, the result isn't necessarily representative of the views of the whole community, or even the online community.
"We need to be cautious when looking at Web polls. Even with large samples they may not be representative of the wider population," she said.
Pugliese also says there is still a possibility that the result could have been skewed through what is termed "self-selection".
Self-selection error occurs because respondents are choosing to take part in the poll themselves. It is not known how self-selection error would affect the result.
"Your representativeness is cut down to Internet users, and among them it's cut down to self-selectors... it's hard to tell if the result is skewed without analysing the demographics of the respondents," she said.
The poll was originally placed on the Internet by ABC Online to gauge their readership's opinions based on their coverage of the Iraq issue. They pulled the poll offline yesterday afternoon after realising that it had effectively been hi-jacked by the wider online community.
"After we had stopped pointing to the poll from our Web sites, and decided that the poll was no longer readily available to our general audience, and so on that basis we terminated it," said Ian Vaile, head of content with ABC New Media.
The ABC Online team were stunned when the number of voters on the poll started to sky-rocket. Despite removing links to the voting page from their site, they were still getting an incredible number of votes.
Although they didn't find any evidence of automatic voting "bots" being used, Vaile says that people shouldn't read too much into the result.
"We don't make any claims about the validity or the representative nature of any of the Web polls that we run because we are keenly aware of their limitations," he said.
Despite the possibility that the result has been skewed, the overwhelming response to the poll has proved that people want to express themselves in any way they can.
"This indicates there is a desire in the community to articulate their opinion on this issue, and they will use any avenue that they can, letters to the editor, blogs, talk-back radio, polls or forums - any way of having their voice heard," Vaile said.
Anyone ever tried to get a "letter to the editor" printed? Our "democracy" effectively prevents any democratic feedback and skews "public" opinion.
Wealth and power sets the agenda. Most know it and will resort to anything to be heard. The roots or terrorism stem from being ignored by unjust powers that be. At least this forum isn't moderated/edited/censored. Not all cynics are crackpots, most are merely educated and informed.