😎 Telegram was banned in Russia — yet 65M Russians still use it daily via VPNs, with 50M+ sending messages every day. The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure — cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday. 😂

🧊 Iran banned Telegram years ago, with a result similar to Russia. The government hoped for mass adoption of its surveillance messaging apps, but got mass adoption of VPNs instead. Now 50M members of the Digital Resistance in Iran are joined by 50M+ more in Russia. 😙

🤝 Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters. The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions. Thousands are building VPNs and proxies. On our end, we’ll keep adapting — making Telegram’s traffic harder to detect and block. ✊

Meet the most powerful polls tech in social media. Telegram's polls update packs a dozen new features:

🗳 Attach photos, videos & audios to options
💡 Let users suggest new options in active polls
🔐 Disable revoting for fixed results
😃 Shuffle options per user
⏱ Set time limits on polls
👀 Show who voted next to each option
📊 View results without voting
🔔 Get notified when someone votes
📂 View all polls in groups / channels
🫣 Hide results until the poll ends
🧠 Add correct answers and explanations for wrong picks

🔜 We're already working on more — 📊 polls stats, plus options to limit voting to channel subscribers or users from selected countries. Turns out bot rigging of polls in large channels is a massive issue, and we're building the tools to stop it. 🛡