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Comment by tuveson | Hacker News Reader

> Polls are the first step in a pipeline that effectively turns money into votes

What? You’re stating this like it’s self-evident, but I don’t follow.

Well if you want to spend money on ensuring that a certain candidate wins, probably you want to spend barely enough to make it happen, right? Like, if your alternatives are to spend a few billion in an untargeted way, or spend a few thousand in a targeted way, then you're going to want to chose the latter for a variety of reasons.

Wouldn't polling data be the place you'd start when it comes to making that decision?

Isn't this the main concept of the Cambridge Analytica story - targeting people in the swing areas, and even based on personal information?

We're already here and I think personal informantion, behaviors, etc collected from social media and corporations would be the bigger threat than the polling itself.

Yeah, we should probably be trying to jam those channels as well. Surely we can find a way to identify and display messages client-side from the people we want to hear from, while filtering out noise from any decoys, such that the platforms can't figure out who is a decoy and who is a human, rendering their product worthless to a would be election interferer.

But that's a whole endeavor. Ignoring or lying when some research company wants to know about your political beliefs is a nice easy start.

I guess? But non-monied groups (e.g. volunteer doorknockers, phonebanks) would use the same data to decide where to focus.

Something about trying to deliberately distort the public about the likely status of an election also just feels icky to me. Likely to cause more harm than good.

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