What does <PERSON> Twitter purchase mean for Venezuelan Twitter? · Global Voices
Illustration by Caracas Chronicles, used with permission.
This story was originally published by Caracas Chronicles and ProBox. It has been edited for length and republished on Global Voices with permission.
On April 25, <PERSON> successfully negotiated a deal to buy Twitter for USD 44 billion, the equivalent of Venezuela’s GDP. What does it mean for Venezuelan Twitter, where inauthentic activity intended to manipulate public opinion is rife?
Before <PERSON> bought Twitter, it was a public company that was regulated by a board. But now, when the company goes private, the social media platform will have fewer safeguards regarding its content moderation. <PERSON> will have the power to reshape discourse on a social network used by more than 200 million people every day and undermine the work the company has made in the last couple of years to mitigate the spread of misinformation and hate speech. Some people celebrate <PERSON>’s ideas regarding freedom of speech, but specialists and digital rights activists are worried that this is a step backward that could undermine democracies, rather than strengthen them.
Any changes made to Twitter's rules and content moderation will affect the way Venezuelans talk and find information on Twitter, especially because it’s more than a social media platform in Venezuela. In many cases, it’s our main channel to get information, especially for the Venezuelan diaspora.
The Venezuelan regime is very much aware of how important “Twitterzuela” conversations are in shaping public opinion. 289
It has worked hard to remain the main actor in political conversations on Twitter. This is why the <PERSON> dictatorship has built a huge troop of people paid with State resources to pollute the Venezuelan digital conversation (and sometimes international conversations, too). The aim is to confuse, manipulate and divert the attention from real problems denounced by civil society, independent media, and activists through Twitter, and to attack specific people or institutions.
The Venezuelan regime has violated the digital rights of journalists, citizens, activists, and politicians by using inauthentic coordinated accounts to impose their narrative on the platform. According to the University of Chicago, inauthentic behavior — a term coined by Meta in 2016 — describes “fake, manipulative engagement by individuals and groups in online environments.”
Are <PERSON>'s promises to fix Twitter enough to fix Twitterzuela?
On April 25, <PERSON> summarized his goals for the platform in a statement: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he tweeted. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.”
🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6
— <PERSON> (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
But in Venezuela, bots aren’t really the main issue, but inauthentic coordinated behavior. While bots, automated and fake accounts used with the intention of interfering with public opinion are a big problem for Twitter, accounts of real people manipulate the conversation and coordinate to promote a specific message that may contain disinformation, propaganda, or harmful content — these are the ones ProBox calls “digital troops.” And although there are basic moderation features and Twitter has been developing AI with the aim of identifying behavior that may violate their rules, it doesn’t look like there’s such a solution that could fix all these problems for now.
What are <PERSON>’s ideas about content moderation and free speech?
<PERSON> speaks much about the virtues of free speech. In an interview at a TED conference earlier this month, he explained that he believed in leaving the content up, no matter how controversial.
Twitter has been one of the platforms with more content moderation after Twitter employees had “spent years trying to make the platform safer.” On December 2, 2021, Twitter announced the suspension of 277 Venezuelan accounts that were found to be promoting the “massive dissemination of accounts, hashtags, and trending topics that support the <PERSON> government’s propaganda and disinformation.” Twitter also found that many of these users had authorized the “Patria” set of applications, allowing the government to access their accounts and monitor their activity.
Soon after Twitter’s effort against chavismo’s inorganic accounts, <PERSON>’s retweets decreased by almost 14 percent compared to the number of retweets he received before this massive suspension. 534