“It’s like a baseball player scoring a home run and asked to review it,” says El Pana to explain the questioned maneuver of Nicolás Maduro to validate his electoral victory before the Supreme Court of Justice, amidst accusations of fraud and the failure to disclose the results. El Pana is dark-skinned, always wears mustard pants, a checkered shirt, almost frozen gestures, and shares the news narration with La Chama. Both are avatars created with artificial intelligence that lend their byte-based faces to disseminate the information produced by dozens of journalists from Venezuela, without compromising their identity and their security in the midst of the political crisis that is being experienced after the elections of July 28 that has left thousands of detainees, including 12 journalists.
The initiative has only been on the air for a week and releases daily episodes with updates that are shared and go viral through social networks. It is one of the strategies that a dozen independent media outlets and information verification platforms have developed, such as Runrunes, El Pitazo, Tal Cual, Efecto Cocuyo, Fake News Hunters, among others, to avoid censorship and the difficulties of reporting on the country from the ground. Nearly 400 media outlets have closed during 120 years of Chavismo, more than a hundred web page domains, mostly informative, are blocked by order of the Government, as is X, Elon Musk’s platform, which Maduro has turned into his enemy.
The avatars, named after the local name for young people in Venezuela, amplify the work of journalists from around twenty independent media outlets integrated into the information alliances called La Hora de Venezuela and Venezuela Vota, created to cover the elections of July 28. The format was conceived and produced by the Latin American platform for collaborative journalism Connectas, which supports the articulation of these alliances. Using artificial intelligence to protect the identity of journalists speaks of the difficulties of the context in which they are currently working in Venezuela.
“This is the way journalists in Venezuela have to do their job,” explains Carlos Huertas, director of the Editorial Board of Connectas, from Colombia. “That is why strategies have been designed to hack the barrier to verified and contrasted information. After the elections, repression increased and the level of exposure that a journalist had increased, so this alternative was sought to give intelligent use to AI, since the content is developed based on the investigations carried out by Venezuelan journalists adapted to the avatar format.”
From outside Venezuela, citizens are also organizing to produce more information about what is happening. On Hacha y Machete, with accounts on Instagram and Tiktok and WhatsApp and Telegram groups, they try to open the way to opinion and, above all, to an explanation of the country. Luken Quintana is in charge from Barcelona. He is a civil engineer with a political vocation and a past in the student movement that put pressure on the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. At some point he had to emigrate, as more than 7 million Venezuelans have already done.
“What we do is identify the news topics that are being talked about less or about which there are information gaps and focus on that. We see a possibility of informing Venezuelans who are abroad, which also permeates inward and also to non-Venezuelans,” says Quintana via video call. The growth of the monitoring channels, where they follow the current state of the crisis and put each new movement or statement into context, speaks of the hunger for information that exists in Venezuela. On July 28, the very day of the elections, there were 100 people. Two days later there were more than 3,000. On TikTok they are starting to grow rapidly.
The government of Nicolás Maduro has now turned the use of social media into a minefield. In recent weeks, fear has caused people to erase their digital identity, hide their profile photos and refrain from expressing themselves in WhatsApp groups. Chavismo has asked its followers to denounce those who dissent from the government, in particular, those who have come out to protest in the demonstrations called by the opposition in rejection of the election results. There have been reports of cases in which the police stop citizens in the street and ask them to show their phones, although this violates the principle of privacy of communications that is in the Constitution, in search of some clue that could show them as opponents of the government. WhatsApp groups that are part of everyday life have been renamed with names that hide whether defenders or journalists gather there and in many the settings have been changed so that only the administrators speak and there are constant reminders that no political content or content that incites hatred can be published. The conversation, in any case, is becoming less and less public.
This moment of siege has not come about overnight. The independent media that are supported in the country have been working collaboratively for a long time and Venezuelans have accumulated learning and resilience during years of democratic erosion. “We have many years of maturing in the use of digital tools, in the construction of networks of trust,” says Luis Carlos Díaz, a human rights activist and specialist in infocitizenship. “But there is also accumulated damage. There have been no television stations that have reported for more than a decade, nor free radios for at least five years. These freedoms have been cut away for several years and that has led people to train themselves in the digital world.”
Digital has a significant reach and it is in this area where the Government now imposes more restrictions, but it also has its limitations in a country where there are regions that experience constant blackouts and there are large gaps in connectivity. A survey on information consumption in Venezuela carried out in 2023 by Espacio Público, Free Press Unlimited and the European Union found that nearly 10% of Venezuelans get their information by word of mouth, based on what their neighbors tell them or what those who have emigrated tell them on the family video call of the week. According to the same study, 63% recognize that there is censorship on social networks. In the possibilities of informing face to face, El Bus TV —an offline journalistic venture that is part of the alliance of independent media— has found a way to reach the most disconnected with newscasts that occur live on the street, on buses and in communities, and by posting informative posters as if they were handwritten newspapers around which they have created a community of readers.
For Díaz, the training of Venezuelans in creating information nodes and curating it for their family or community environment is what made it possible for the until-recently unknown Edmundo González Urrutia to become the opposition candidate and winner of the contest, according to the minutes of 83.5% of the tables that the coalition of parties collected with its witnesses and has published to denounce fraud. “There is an information network that the people themselves have already built.”
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