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Yeah I think Telegram, like Whatsapp, is adopted broadly enough not to bias too heavily in one direction. Definitely not 90%, and especially not if that “bias”
by dstick 6y ago
Yeah I think Telegram, like Whatsapp, is adopted broadly enough not to bias too heavily in one direction. Definitely not 90%, and especially not if that “bias” matches the word on the street.
- kube-system 6y agoTelegram? 5% of the world uses Telegram. And I bet the 50+ age demographic is heavily underrepresented in that subset. Significant sample bias shows up in US polling using mediums that are exponentially more widespread. Nonetheless, I don't doubt the validity of these particular results, because I think we have enough corroborating evidence. We don't have to justify the rigorousness of a Telegram poll to come to that same conclusion.
- tripzilch 6y agoPeople in different parts of the world differ HUGELY in what instant-messaging communications platform they use. For instance people in the US still use text-messaging to a significant percentage. That's hard for me to believe as well. It's no use looking at Telegram's world usage, that's for sure.
- kube-system 6y agoMaybe Telegram is popular in Belarus, but there is one thing that is true all over the world: rates of technology literacy and access is lower for the old/poor/rural.
- marcosdumay 6y agoBiases are irrelevant. If you look a the numbers, there are more people saying they voted for the opposition on the Telegram pool than votes on the official pool. About 5 times as many.
- iagovar 6y agoExactly, this is impossible to reconcile. Either there has been vote fraud or this people didn't actually go to the poll station. Or people can vote more than once.
- lqdc13 6y agoWhat about the people under 18 who I assume could take the poll and also people who didn't go to vote but took a few seconds to take the poll on Telegram? Also what about all the babushkas who most likely voted for Lukashenko but don't have a smartphone? This is not to say that more people didn't vote for the opposition than the official numbers state. But Lukashenko still could have won.
- tw04 6y agoWe'll say Belarus has 1m people that are old enough to both have a smart phone and be under the legal voting age (and that's being extremely gracious). Unless you're saying literally EVERY ONE OF THEM voted in this poll AND voted for the opposition, there are STILL more people of voting age in the telegram poll who voted for the opposition than "officially" voted for the opposition. The numbers are nearly impossible to believe unless Telegram is intentionally fudging the numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Belarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Belarus
- kube-system 6y agoThis is certainly damning data, but having a telephone in Belarus does not necessarily mean that person voted in the prior election. This is good evidence, but not a mathematical proof.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe people can lie to Telegram, Telegram can lie, somebody can attack the communications, somebody can attack the telephones, somebody can impersonate the numbers, all the Telegram voters can be from those 60% that didn't vote... There are many ways that could happen. But it's pretty good evidence to add to the context, and the pile of evidence was already quite big.