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Comment by bradchris | Hacker News Reader

I mean, the poll is biased in that most people who saw it are followers of Elon Musk already (and the split is probably 60-70% people who like him, the rest being journalists, people curious to see what he has to say, and yes, people who disagree with him).

It’s not an objective measure or poll, much in the same way that Trump (or any politician) blasting out “opinion polls” to their donors is not representative of the general US population, so much as the contingent that voted/donated to them.

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He has 82 million followers. That’s a lot of people to be completely biased. Granted, it’s not half a billion for completely unbiased sample, but still, that’s a lot.

It seems fairly obvious that most people who follow him do that because they like what he has to say. Even if he had 500 million followers it still wouldn't be an unbiased sample.

Followers != people who take the time to engage with his polls/other content

I'm on Twitter most every day; I don't follow Elon Musk (I try not to follow any big twitter accounts, rather than curate interesting smaller accounts); I didn't see the poll until two days after it was already closed; I think it's fair to say that most people who saw the poll were

a) Either followers of Elon

b) People the Twitter Algorithm decided were most likely to interact with it -- I.E. people who would be interested in what Elon has to say

Just because Elon tweeted something doesn't mean all of Twitter saw it.

Bias is a spectrum, and if your pool is non-random, you will always have a much higher bias than otherwise.

Yeah, and so did Donald Trump before he got banned in 2020; his followership wasn't at all representative of all of Twitter (and that's even considering many people who actively disagreed with him probably followed him purely because of his position of power)

If you polled the audience at a regular-season San Francisco Giants home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers as to what team they support, you'd probably get an overwhelming number of responses indicating support for the Giants. That does not mean more people support the Giants than the Dodgers in Los Angeles. They're two different populations, so you can't generalize the outcome from one to the other.

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