Telegram edit feature led to its ban in India, NTA says students losing money to it
India banned Telegram on Tuesday till June 22. This decision came ahead of the NEET re-test on June 21. While the platform has been banned
India banned Telegram on Tuesday till June 22. This decision came ahead of the NEET re-test on June 21. While the platform has been banned till June 22, the edit feature of Telegram will remain disabled till June 30, although it is not clear how India will specifically enforce the ban on a feature inside an app. There have been a number of theories around why Telegram has been banned in India. And different people, including Telegram creator Pavel Durov, have said different things. Now the Testing Agency (NTA) claims the ban is primarily due to fake NEET paper scam on the app. Read Full Story The scam, as explained by NTA on X, was enabled by the way the edit feature works in Telegram. The app allows people to edit messages for up to 48 hours. And not just a simple edit, the app allows users to change the file or files attached with the message. More significantly, and the reason why Telegram has attracted a ban, is that the “edited” label is not displayed as prominently and clearly as it should be in all chats. NTA alleges the way “edited” labels is displayed, or not displayed at all when the same message is forwarded to a different group, creates potential for scams. Also, by default, the timestamp in the messages remains that of the original time when it was posted.
The agency says that on the last occasion, scammers sold fake NEET papers a day or two days before the exam. And once the exam happened, the PDF file that they sold was replaced by the actual paper through the edit feature of Telegram. Anybody who bought the fake test essentially lost money and had no way to even prove that they were sold the fake paper. Abhishek Singh, the director general of NTA, claimed on X that scams with fake papers happened after the NEET exams in May. He said, “On the 3rd of May, when the examination was conducted, we got a similar complaint wherein a video was circulated by several handles after the examination was conducted. It showed a question paper which was shared on that Telegram channel on the 1st of May, that is two days before the examination.” The problem with the edit functionality has been acknowledged by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, even though he termed the ban not logical. He wrote on X, “We’re making the ‘edited’ label more visible to prevent backdating scams.” Pavel added that Telegram had “removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India” in recent months. Teen hackers pushback on NTA claim While it seems NTA has a point when it comes to the edit functionality on Telegram, many are questioning if a ban is necessary. That is because Telegram does show the time when the message was edited, along with the time when it was originally posted.
The BriefWire