Venezuela is considered one of the five countries in the world where the State has developed greater capacities to carry out online propaganda operations. The Venezuelan State has carried out cyberbullying operations using trolls since at least 2009 and automated operations to drive opinion trends since 2010. The COVID-19 pandemic has been another territory for information warfare operations carried out by the Venezuelan official communication apparatus.
Under the state of alarm due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Venezuelan State continued its systematic practices of violation of civil and political rights of citizens, in this case of health personnel, the sick, migrants and journalists.
Doctors and nurses were harassed for denouncing the collapse of the public health system, including in private communications such as their status on WhatsApp or voice notes originally intended for friends, which went viral.
One of the emblematic cases is the arrest of Julio Molina, a 72-year-old doctor, accused of causing panic, causing stress in the community and inciting hatred. This arbitrary detention was carried out alleging the unconstitutional Law Against Hate, after Molina denounced that the Núñez Tovar Hospital, in the eastern part of the country, had no supplies to face the emergency.
Although it seems that the campaigns aimed at promoting information disorders only concern the digital ecosystem, in the Venezuelan context there has been evidence of the existence of information disorder strategies using traditional media, at least since 2002. In the field of information disorders Associated with COVID-19, open signal television, specifically the channels under the control of the Venezuelan State, have been frequently used for the introduction of misleading, manipulated or propaganda content.
The second propagation channel for this type of content from the ruling party was Twitter, using the official networks of the public administration; the third channel was WhatsApp, especially with the use of voice notes that simulated leaks; and the fourth way was the government channels on Telegram, where operational orders are sent daily to position the official labels.
Finally, the official labels have the support of tens of thousands of users of the Patria System who are activated as patriotic tweeters to qualify for the dollar cent bonuses that are distributed among those who use the labels of the day.
On Twitter, we observed a pattern of introduction of disinformation operations via comments in responses to tweets from popular journalists, using inauthentic accounts. We also observed that inauthentic accounts often use pseudonyms and their profile images often appear to be generated by artificial intelligence.
There are also signs of the use of troll farms and astroturfing operations, which simulate the organic opinions of citizens or grassroots activists, but which actually respond to propaganda lines aimed at presenting the official management of the epidemic as efficient.
Disinformation operations have been carried out that start with rumors or leaks on WhatsApp, generate polarized debates on Twitter and end in denials in official communication channels, as was the case of the biased news of the installation of crematorium ovens in the parking lot of the El Poliedro entertainment center, in Caracas.
Among the most important information disorders registered in Venezuela in the year of the pandemic, the stigmatization of returning Venezuelan migrants as “biological weapons” against the country stands out. Both Nicolás Maduro and other officials of his administration went so far as to say in official TV broadcasts that the returned migrants are “biological weapons” introduced into Venezuela by the President of Colombia, Iván Duque.
On May 20, 2020, Nicolás Maduro publicly accused the Colombian government of “contaminating” Venezuela with buses full of infected people. Maduro’s declaration marked the beginning of a government policy to stigmatize migrants. Official orders were to denounce returnees through emails, mark houses where migrants were suspected, and concentrate migrants in confinement centers.
In addition, an incriminating official speech for bioterrorism was maintained against Colombia and Brazil, countries which are accused of infiltrating the virus through their borders with Venezuela.
The negative or positive evaluation of vaccines according to the place of origin of their development, and not according to scientific criteria, has been another constant in the last six months. The arrival in the country of the first batch of Russian Sputnik vaccines was celebrated with the “tag of the day” #SputnikVEnVenezuela, broadcast by the official communications apparatus, including the senior leaders of the PSUV, military structures such as the Integral Defense Operational Zones (ZODI ) and the Strategic Regions of Comprehensive Defense (REDI).
On the contrary, at the end of March 2021, the official communication apparatus deployed a biased information campaign to justify its refusal to give Venezuela the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the National Assembly led by the pro-democratization forces had managed to obtain via the COVAX mechanism of the Pan American Health Organization.
The official communication apparatus, with Nicolás Maduro himself as a spokesperson, has also dedicated itself to disseminating pseudoscience content, in a country with low access to diagnosis and treatment services for COVID-19.
In the first cycle of contagion in Venezuela, through the State channels, they intensively promoted the use of a homemade concoction with the malojillo or lemon verbena plant as the main ingredient that would supposedly cure COVID-19. On the national radio and television network, Nicolás Maduro promoted Sirio Quintero’s formula, made up of six ingredients: lemon verbena, ginger, black pepper, lemon peel, lemon juice, honey and elderberry, as the cure against the coronavirus.
At the beginning of 2021, the official communication apparatus launched the commercial brand Carvativir as a miracle cure for COVID-19, drops whose active ingredient is isothymol, widely used as an oral disinfectant and in anti-parasitic drugs.
For the commercial launch of Carvativir, strategies were combined to legitimize pseudoscience (with the use of a false scientific article published on the document-sharing platform Scribd), appeal to naturist markets and appeal to religious beliefs (secondary denomination “miraculous droplets of José Gregorio Hernández ”, referring to the Venezuelan doctor in the process of canonization by the Catholic Church).
* Most of the data referred to in this article comes from the study: Informational disorders propagated in Venezuela, via WhatsApp and social networks, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, (https://ift.tt/31zZ3Vi) carried out by Puyosa; Madriz; Alvarado; Andueza; Cordova; & Azpúrua (2021).
Iria Puyosa is a researcher in political communication. Member of the Communication Research Institute of the Central University of Venezuela (ININCO / UCV). President of the Venezuelan Studies Section of LASA (2018-2020). Visiting Professor at Brown University. Doctor from the Univ. Of Michigan.
Copyright Latinoamerica21.com and Clarín, 2021.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/venezuela-a-state-that-spreads-disinformation-amid-the-pandemic/
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