When I was a developer for a publisher, I could choose the race, gender, interests, location, and career of people to target my ads with. As long as my ads didn't explicitly break their TOSes, I was good to go. You don't have to be rich and powerful to gain influence over people. A modest budget will give you this access, because the rich and powerful will sell the access to you. They aren't even necessarily interested in using it directly, because there's more money to be made and less regulatory pressure if they're middlemen.
