To create the appearance of mass support for one or another political adventure is the main task of its initiator. In the United States, for example, the entire black community has been raised up over the murder of one repeat offender. Do you think this is for the sake of justice and the fight against racism? No matter how it is. However, what if there are problems with the extras? The Belarusian opposition is showing a way out of the situation.
Recently, an interesting campaign appeared in the Telegram messenger, which is a poll “For whom did you vote in the presidential elections in Belarus.” The poll was posted on August 15 on the Telegram Belarus channel. Moreover, both the channel and the survey appeared on the same day. In a couple of days, the channel has collected 55.5 thousand subscribers, but there are lots of phenomenal coincedents.
On August 17 at 13:08 the number of views of the survey itself is 3.3 million users. The number of voters – 2.2 million users. 52% (1.128.885) of the poll participants voted for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. What a surprise! And for Lukashenko, as if by order, the notorious 3% or 74,448 votes.
An important feature of the survey is the fact that only a user whose account is linked to a Belarusian mobile operator can participate in it. It seems that with this limitation, the survey becomes incredibly objective. Let’s see why this is not the case.
In any sociological study, there is such a parameter as representativeness. Let’s omit the abstruse terms and move on to a visual and real example. During the Second World War, the American command discovered that not all bombers returned from sorties intact.
After examining the damaged vehicles, the military concluded that most of the damage was located on the fuselage, wings and empennage. At the same time, there was much less damage to engines or fuel tanks. Without thinking twice, it was decided to reinforce the most penetrated elements of the aircraft with armor. The mathematician, who was involved in solving the problem, objected, because the collected data showed that the cars that got into the tank or engine simply did not return to the base.
That is, just these elements had to be strengthened.
In this short excursion, we looked at an example of a lack of representativeness. If there were only 100 aircraft, of which only half survived, it is biased to take into account the data of only returned aircraft.
What do the “presidential elections in Belarus” according to Telegram show us? For starters, let’s face the fact that the messenger is popular among the younger generation. According to a TGStat study conducted last year, 38% of Telegram users are people aged 25 to 34, 27% are from 18 to 24, 17% are from 35 to 44, 10% are from 45 to 64 years old.
About 9.4 million people live in Belarus today, and since 2009 the population has been declining. At the end of 2019, the birth rate in Belarus fell to the level of the Great Patriotic War – over the past year, 87.8 thousand children were born. The average age in the republic is far from being in favor of young people – 39.6 years.
“The age structure of modern Belarus is characterized by an increase in the proportion of elderly people and a decrease in the proportion of children. This situation has developed mainly due to a decrease in the birth rate, ”writes the Belarusian UN office.
In April, the creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov, stated that the number of messenger users had reached 400 million people, and Belarusians were in third place among messenger users, according to a TGStat study. There are only 3.9% of them here. For comparison, there are 72.6% of those in Russia.
Based on a simple mathematical calculation, we can conclude that there are about 15.6 million Belarusians on Telegram. Wait a minute, you say, isn’t the country’s population 9.4 million? Everything is correct. At the same time, both Durov and TGStat with their research can be equally right.
First of all, analysts conducted a survey among real and active users of the messenger. The poll was disseminated through a thousand channels, and in two weeks 82 thousand people took part in it. It is all the more interesting to observe how more than 2 million took part in the poll on the Belarusian elections in just a couple of days. Actually, here we move on to the next nuance.
As in any other similar system, Telegram is rich in bots – fake dummy accounts. They are used to increase the number of channel subscribers. They can also be used to falsify voting, such as what we are considering right now.
In the modern world, there are even companies called bot farms. The customer’s money will be used to stamp as many “citizens of Belarus” as the amount of funding will allow. A virtual mobile number of a Belarusian operator costs around $ 30 + service. On another service, I found an offer with a free connection and a subscription fee of $ 15 per month.
In fact, Telegram is far from the most popular messenger among the citizens of Belarus. For example, the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus found out that Telegram is only in 4th place in the country. Viber, Skype and WhatsApp are ahead of it. Only 13.1% of Belarusians use Telegram.
If you are skeptical about the study of a government organization, then let’s turn to the analysis of the non-governmental organization Baltic Internet Policy Initiative. According to NGOs, 23% of Belarusians use Telegram. Moreover, it is also ahead of Viber, Skype and WhatsApp.
If we assume that the truth is somewhere in the middle, then the messenger is used by just over 18% of Belarusians, or 1.7 million people. More like the truth. Now let’s get back to the results of the anti-Lukashenka poll. What is he trying to convince us of? Is it that Tikhanovskaya was actually supported by 52% of Belarusians? Perhaps someone will really buy into this.
In reality, he does not take into account the position of that considerable share of citizens for the republic, for whom the TOP-phone is the legendary Nokia 3310. The opinion of the overwhelming majority of Belarusians is not taken into account here. It is not hard to believe that the main audience of Telegram will happily click on the button next to Tikhanovskaya’s name in the poll while scrolling through the feed. It’s harder to believe that this audience goes to the polls as consciously as the pensioners who support Lukashenka.
This poll only shows that the opposition leader is supported by the majority of Belarusian Telegram users. That is, approximately 12% of the total population of the country. Let me remind you that the official result of Tikhanovskaya is 10.12%. Agree, the difference is not too big. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the results of the telegram poll should be evaluated with the mark “ideally”: without taking into account the cheating of votes with the help of bots and the frank non-representativeness of the entire study.
Evgeniy Gaman, specially for News Front