Week 12 – Venezuela’s citizens tweet for freedom
Previously, I wrote how twitter attacks by dictatorships, such as those in Syria, can be used to influence a population. Now I will center on how twitter has relevance for concerned citizens attempting to report electoral fraud instantly and up to the minute.
Recently, the multi-decade rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came to end. The Chavez period in Venezuela was marred with allegations of dictatorship and intense corruption. Chavez was “elected” in a series of disputed votes where many citizens reported their votes tossed out, deleted, or instances of ballot stuffing. When Chavez was first elected, in the 1990’s, Twitter didn’t exist and neither did other forms of popularly channeled and user edited media.
Today, with Venezuela facing yet another election, we see evidence in an article on Global Voices Online (citation below) that Venezuelans (many of whom have Twitter and mobile phones) are using their accounts to tweet election irregularities they run across during the election season. If an opposition candidate in a remote province is forced to stop campaigning due to the corrupt police declaring his peaceful rally “dangerous” (this happened), then citizens in that province can spread the world globally and domestically about these issues. Many of these tweets in question reached international news networks, and gave credence to the notion the most recent Venezuelan election was an orchestrated sham.
In April 2010, the government announced the creation of the “communicational guerrilla“, a group of citizens employed to “fight the ideological battle” in independent and mainstream media and on the Internet. So today, the battle is being fought in hashtags: keyword positioning in support of and against the government is a constant, and there are, on both sides, users dedicated to monitoring specific keywords to respond, often aggressively, to those expressing controversial opinions.
A&S 300 - Social Media Blog 