The man from Caracas at the Wall Street Journal, Ezequiel Minaya, recently published an article titled “The Suppression of Press in Venezuela Fuels Growth of Online Media,” highlighting various challenges faced by the Venezuelan press. However, I must disagree with Minaya’s claim that “the government has not been so aggressive online, although regulations controlling media content have extended to the Internet.” Perhaps he missed another WSJ article from February this year, which stated:
The Venezuelan government, beset by protests nationwide, appears to have escalated the censorship of Internet services used by protesters and of sites that have criticized the government’s response to the unrest, tech companies and researchers have reported.
Dozens of websites, including Pastebin.com, which protesters used to share photos, have been blocked in Venezuela, according to Herdict, an initiative of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society that gathers data on Internet filtering. Such blocks are typically implemented by local Internet service providers, disrupting connections between users’ computers and the servers hosting the websites or services they are trying to reach.
“Venezuelans are encountering an increasing curtain of censorship from a regime desperate to hide the brutal repression imposed on protesters and innocent civilians,” wrote Alek Boyd, founder of INFODIO, a mostly English-language blog about corruption in Venezuela, in a post urging readers to reshare messages on social media regarding Venezuela.
By blocking specific domains or IP addresses, service providers sever the connection between a user’s computer and the website or service they are trying to access, a crude method to restrict access to a known list of websites. These techniques have long been utilized in countries like China, where the government tightly controls the media and Internet, but China also uses more sophisticated filtering technology that can detect prohibited keywords within unknown web pages and disrupt access to those pages as well.
Access interruptions in Venezuela were already proving effective. Mr. Boyd from INFODIO noted that traffic to his site dropped to between 4,000 and 6,000 visits per day, compared to 20,000 per day before it was allegedly blocked in the country in mid-January. Mr. Boyd is also exploring services that could assist his readers in bypassing any blocks more easily.
Some time ago, I spoke with Minaya about online censorship and being a blogger in Venezuela these days. My case, if I may say so, is unique; as far as I know, I am not only the only Venezuelan blogger whose site has faced censorship while mostly writing in English, but the proxies I linked to in my Twitter profile for readers based in Venezuela have also been systematically blocked. Even Reporters Without Borders, which runs a campaign aptly called We Fight Against Censorship, reported on my case in an article titled “CORRUPTION BEYOND BOUNDS IN VENEZUELAN INTERNET.”
But the antics of chavismo are not limited to censoring a single website. Close collaborators of Nicolás Maduro, like Primicias24.com Carlos Herrera, have published content that goes well beyond mere defamation into the realm of the impossible. While distressed journalists in Venezuela may expect a visit from intelligence agents at any moment, a recent comment made by someone unrelated to my usual blogging activities—saying “they’re looking for you and want you dead”—left me with no doubt about what could happen if I lived in Venezuela.
The chavismo controls CANTV, and thus 87% of Internet traffic. Why would a state telecom company take the effort to block a blogger’s site, as well as the proxy servers that allow people to access that site? And can that truly be called “the government has not been so aggressive online”?