Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Thursday ordered the suspension of social network X, formerly Twitter, from its activities in the country “for a period of 10 days” so that the corporation, owned by South African magnate Elon Musk, can present “its findings” to the authorities, in what would be an attempt to place conditions on the platform’s continuity.
“I have signed a point of agreement with the proposal made with the National Telecommunications Commission, Conatel, to remove the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, from circulation in Venezuela for 10 days,” Maduro said.
The Bolivarian leader added that Musk “has violated all the rules of the social network Twitter itself, now known as X. And he has incited hatred, fascism, civil war, death, and confrontation among Venezuelans. He has violated all the laws of Venezuela, and in Venezuela there is law.”
In recent weeks, Musk has followed the Venezuelan crisis on the X network and openly supported María Corina Machado and the opposition presidential candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, directly blaming Maduro for having destroyed the country. Maduro has reacted irritably to some of his statements, and has accused him of being part of the sabotage against Venezuela, the National Electoral Council and its government.
Maduro and the Chavista leadership have been criticized particularly harshly by citizen activism on social media, despite the prevailing censorship. Much of the evidence supporting the Venezuelan opposition’s electoral victory has circulated — including scanned official records posted on the website that Machado announced and that the National Electoral Council has not published — and interviews and graphics questioning Maduro’s appointment as president continue to circulate.
The decision announced by Maduro adds to a sequence of harsh criticisms made by the Venezuelan president himself to other frequently used social networks, such as Instagram, TikTok or WhatsApp, allegedly for fomenting hatred against his movement and conspiring to censor accounts of revolutionary leaders. Maduro ordered his followers to delete the application from their cell phones “immediately, progressively and voluntarily.”
During the electoral campaign, Maduro made a huge effort in money and creativity to consolidate his content and that of his movement, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, on social media, particularly on TikTok, with a propaganda strategy that had some success and was praised for its formal merits.
Social media, one of the few spaces for consuming news and promoting relatively free content in the country, has been a space used and exploited by Chavismo with tenacity in its communication strategies. For a time, the government maintained an even pulse with the opposition accounts in the placement of matrices. The organic influence of the Chavista movement on audiences has greatly diminished for several years now.
In the times of Hugo Chávez, before the arrival of Instagram, the famous “communication guerrillas” were organized for Twitter by the Ministry of Communication and Information: activists and journalism students trained in digital communication techniques, presumably to “dismantle the lies of the big media and their journalists.” They gradually became extinct over time.
Every day, the Maduro government uses many hashtags promoting slogans, anniversaries and cultural values of Chavismo. At the same time, angry anti-Chavez content or videos of denunciations circulate on all the networks and go viral quickly.
The Anti-Hate Law, approved by Chavismo in 2017, considerably moderated the content of social networks in Venezuela, particularly Twitter, now X, one of the most consumed by the local public in demand for political information and public opinion debates.
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