Calvin Ayre – A protest movement has been underway in Venezuela since early last week over economic destabilization caused by President Nicolas Maduro’s currency and price controls. The government issued a ban on all protests after they turned violent, killing three students and leaving dozens more injured – a turn of events the opposition leader, a Harvard-educated former mayor from the country’s east named Leopoldo Lopez, blames on pro-government militias. (No points for guessing who the government blames the violence on.)
Despite the protest ban, the anti-government protests have continued. And despite a media blackout – all the local media are government-owned – Venezuelans know what’s going on in the country thanks to self-organization via modern communication technology. The situation calls to mind political unrest in several other countries in the age of social media.
oth Facebook and Twitter were beginning to come of age in 2009 when Iran’s “Green Revolution” protests against the contested election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began. The Iranian government went into damage-control mode in support of its president. It cracked down not only on its own people but also on the international press, arresting foreign journalists and banning them from leaving their offices. Then, after opposition supporters organizing over social networks launched DDoS attacks on Ahmadinejad’s website, the government responded by shutting down national internet access before reinstating it with heavy filtering.
Iranian users stayed ahead of the government’s censorship regime by using proxies, some of which were provided on a volunteer basis by hacktivists in the West. Maintaining access to the net in the face of government censorship allowed protestors to use YouTube to provide witness to shocking events from the protests like that of the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan at the hands of a pro-government militiaman, and to use Twitter and Facebook to amplify the reach of their citizen journalism.
