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On Thursday, August 8, Nicolás Maduro sentenced the blockade of X in Venezuela. First he said it was a “temporary” measure of 10 days until his new archenemy, Elon Musk, stopped inciting hatred, facism and civil war. A month after that announcement, X is still blocked, although that does not mean it is inactive.
While civil society uses VPN to participate in the debate within X and report what is happening in Venezuela, radical Chavismo also does the same.
After a month of shutting down his X account and asking everyone else to do the same, Nicolás Maduro has on one side a civil society that decided to resume a conversation in which it had been displaced and a radical government that continues to misinform and promote campaigns with hate speech.
Maduro blocks X but does not silence radical Chavism
After Maduro’s announcement, an important part of the Chavista troop has remained active in X. Despite the fact that on August 9, the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIPCCI), promoted with about 3,128 tweets the hashtag #HastaProntoX, reaffirming the measure announced by Maduro the day before; the radical ruling party continued positioning tags and actively participating in this platform, very actively misinforming in various social networks after the presidential elections.
Only five days after the X blockade (August 14), Diosdado Cabello and his program “Con el Mazo Dando” positioned #VenezuelaTodaEnPaz with more than 4,353 tweets, maintaining the routine of every Wednesday of promoting a hashtag while broadcasting live on VTV and YouTube. On August 22, the pro-government troops again followed Cabello’s guidelines by promoting “#SayonaFascistaTerrorista” with more than 109,000 tweets, attacking María Corina Machado.
These join other hashtags positioned as trending by the pro-government troops after August 9, such as #ElAlgoritmoNoMeUsa with around 6,500 tweets, #EdmundoPresoYa with at least 4,590 tweets and #FascistasNoPasarán with approximately 4,970 tweets. All throughout the month chavismo is supposed to “no longer use X”.
ProBox conducted a study of the conversation around words, hashtags and several key users of radical chavismo active after August 09 such as: #ElAlgoritmoNoMeUsa, #VenezuelaTodaEnPaz, #PazPazPazPaz, #SayonaFascistaTerrorista, #FascistasNoPasaran, #EdmundoPresoYa, @conelmazodando, @indiurbaneja, @roilopezrivas, @vnvenezuelanews, @pedrokonductaz, @conelmazodando and “bloqueo de redes”.
11,221 mentions were obtained between August 07 and September 08, 76.48% came from Instagram (8,582 posts), followed by X with 13.08% of the mentions (1,468 posts), then Facebook with 7.47% (838 posts), and finally TikTok with 2.97% (333 posts).
The peak of this conversation was concentrated on August 19 with 952 mentions registered, and then on August 20 with 844 mentions. All after the announcement of Maduro’s blocking of the platform, days before.
In X, which so far is the only social network officially blocked, the chavismo conversation yielded 1,468 mentions, and the peaks of activity are found long after its blocking, one on August 14 with 78 mentions and another on September 2 with 114. This shows how part of the ruling party also circumvents the blocking of the social network imposed by Maduro and continues to use X to promote its narratives.
It is not only Diosdado
On September 5, RunRunes published a note showing that at least 10 chavista figures were still active on X. This showed that Maduro’s orders were not only not followed by Diosdado Cabello and the followers of his program, but that other accounts already linked to the radical government and media of the Venezuelan regime, such as “Venezuela News”, continued to produce content on the platform despite X’s blockade, either supporting Maduro or attacking the opposition.
Following its usual line of content with multiple tweets dedicated to caricatures of the day aimed at ridiculing Edmundo González and even rebroadcasts of Diosdado Cabello’s programs. One can also observe tweets from ruling party personalities such as Pedro Karvajalino attacking María Corina Machado’s commandos and accusing them of allegedly being a “terrorist network organized by the US and the Venezuelan extreme right”, citing articles from Venezuela News.
Indira Urbaneja, also a supporter of the ruling party, published a tweet posted 20 days after the blockade supporting Diosdado Cabello and his program through the platform. In addition, one of the main spokespersons of the “Free Alex Saab” movement, Roi López Rivas, has also remained active on the platform despite the blockade.
“Nicolás Maduro” appears in at least 3,627 mentions (32.32% of the publications obtained) in the search performed by ProBox, demonstrating how messages around Maduro are published in the conversation of the radical ruling party, despite the fact that this same party was the one who ordered the blocking of the social network.
X is no longer official territory although they are still active
For many years (2021, 2022 and 2023), the regime has strategically and systematically polluted the conversation on Twitter, in the midst of what, according to them, was the response to “a communicational war”. Openly, the X account linked to the Ministry of Communication and Information (MIPPCI) has dictated the guideline to position trends through the “hashtag of the day”, amplifying propaganda and disinformation with the help of the famous “Tuiteros de la Patria” and networks of pro-government accounts that sought to minimize the voices of protest from civil society.
In the context of the July 28 presidential elections, the conversation online was changing. Venezuelan civil society had been gaining ground on X and, after its blockade, has managed to grow in the positioning of narratives and socio-political hashtags on this social network. An analysis by ProBox between August 9 and September 1 reflects this.
During this period in which access to X has been blocked and chavismo was “ordered” to stop using the platform, 35 socio-political trends were positioned in the country, which accumulated 1.8 million messages; most of them (17) were driven solely by civil society, grouping 70.11% of the tweets.
The reason for staying in X
According to DataReportal’s Global Digital 2024 Report, Venezuela has 21.37 million active mobile cellular connections at the beginning of 2024, equivalent to 73.4 percent of the total population. Of this sample, 14.05 million active social network user identities were counted in January of this year.
Although X would be among the last places in number of users in Venezuela with 2.31 million, it is in this social media platform where more information is shared and used for reporting and access to independent publications, replacing the role of entertainment that other platforms usually have.
Many opinion leaders congregate in X and amplify these messages among people who see them as important referents, so the abandonment of chavismo of the platform gave way precisely to the opposition and citizens to retake a space completely, especially in the face of increased censorship and persecution in the country.
With a regime that institutionalizes online surveillance and persecution, sowing digital terror that translates into physical and digital persecution; abandoning a space like X could be a major strategic mistake, so it is not surprising that the radical ruling party, led by one of the main intimidators of the regime such as Diosdado Cabello, ignore Maduro’s guidelines.
