My personal opinion is that telegram’s actions are reasonable in this context.
Navalny’s team fucked up by publishing their recommendations only on the 15th, two days before voting. I don’t understand that decision at all.
Twitter does not, Facebook does not, Telegram does not - nobody cares except for France.
How is Russia different?
As a Russian: the election has a limited relevance beyond a certain type of signaling. The majority of United Russia is largely guaranteed by the “electoral sultanates”, so votes cast now will not impact new legislation over the next five years.
If your purpose is to signal things, being morally clean is more important than the number of votes you manage to achieve. If a law is reasonable, and a norm in multiple other well-regarded systems, it makes sense to comply.
Source: observing one.
It is strictly enforced in France. But Internet knows no borders so the statistics of votes (which is is illegal to provide in France during the voting day) are available outside of France (usually in French speaking Belgian / Swiss online newspapers, or Twitter/FB/...).
My point is that a country cannot expect that other countries (and services in these countries) will follow their rules.
> If your purpose is to signal things, being morally clean is more important than the number of votes you manage to achieve. If a law is reasonable, and a norm in multiple other well-regarded systems, it makes sense to comply.
I am not sure I understand that point.
It’s not strictly enforced. Exit polls published outside France are collected inside France. Those who collect with clear intent to immediately publish are subject to French law, and may be fined. Which, from what you are saying, does not happen.
> I am not sure I understand that point
I am not sure how to explain it better. You should not both demand lawful election and circumvent electoral laws at the same time. You can, and people do, but it’s not a strong position.
Exit polls are legal. Publishing them is not. They are published by non-French entities, which cannot be fined because of some internal law of ours.
> You should not both demand lawful election and circumvent electoral laws at the same time. You can, and people do, but it’s not a strong position
The rules are from the times where information was provided by printed newspapers, radio and TV. It is time to realize that we are in a different world and adapt.
If we allow foreign newspapers to publish data (because we cannot forbid that), we should give an equal chance to the French ones.
If you know the candidates beforehand, you can bully them before the election, see who wins nevertheless, and bully those again.
> to have all 225 “recommended” candidates withdraw?
Having some of them withdraw is also useful, it's a numbers game.
Smart Voting™ creates these popular candidates in the districts where all competitors of Putin's guy are more or less equally popular. Knowing whom they will make popular is an advantage for Putin, don't you agree?
I have a feeling you're arguing out of stubbornness. My original point was that announcing the Smart Voting lists in the last moment can be useful, I think gave some good reasons for it.
Smart voting does not create new popular candidates. It’s a way to concentrate the 5 % they can access (or 2 %, if badly mismanaged by publishing the list too late) in an efficient way.