Telegram Might Get Tools for Fighting Poll Manipulation

In his personal Telegram channel, Pavel Durov mentioned that the messenger is working on tools that will help channel owners detect rigging in polls and protect the results from manipulation.

Telegram's CEO listed the following measures:
• Poll statistics.
• Limit voting to channel subscribers.
• Limit voting to users from select countries.

In the past, Telegram has already used region-gating to prevent poll rigging, but only on a case-by-case basis — for example, during the 2020 protests in Belarus, Telegram published a poll in which only users with Belarusian SIM cards could vote.

Similarly, the messenger already allows channel owners to limit their giveaways to select countries.

Detailed voting statistics are very useful for detecting anomalies during polling. You could already see this feature in Pavel Durov’s previous product, VK․com, where it was added back in 2012, when Pavel was still its CEO.

The new set of features is likely inspired by rigging in a political poll that Pavel Durov happened to notice. He shared that most of the fake votes were made by accounts originating from “exotic countries”.

There are still no details on what poll stats will look like. At the same time, the tools for limiting the poll audience appear to be very similar to ones that are already available for giveaways, from which we can speculate about how they will work:

• Voter's Country
Usually, Telegram infers a user's region from the country where the account's SIM card is registered.

• Limiting to Channel Subscribers
Surges of bot subscribers are a very common problem admin channels face when they hold giveaways. Bot farm owners command their accounts to join channels with active giveaways to get free Premium subscriptions, while the channel owners have no tools to retaliate.

Without an “only existing subscribers can vote” option, polls can inherit this problem.