The Revolution Will be Tweeted

Call me if you know anything else,” I remember asking my father as I walked by Southside frantically refreshing my Twitter feed. He answered back in a reassuring tone that told me I shouldn’t worry, that this apparent protest in Venezuela was probably nothing.

How wrong we would all be. Just a few minutes ago, while scrolling through my Twitter feed, I noticed an unusual influx of tweets coming from my friends in Venezuela. I had lived in the country from 2001 to 2009 and hadn’t been keeping up with the news over the past few months. They seemed to be mentioning some protest, and that pro-government forces were attacking them. I immediately opened up El Universal, a major Venezuelan newspaper, and saw nothing. Surely if such a reputable news source had said nothing then the claims by my friends were probably just what my father had insinuated: nothing to worry about, or just a case of the boy who cried wolf.

To my surprise, that was not the case. During the day, more tweets emerged with confusing information, but the news outlets remained silent. And in these past weeks, communication has only worsened.
On February 12th, the protests in Caracas took a deadly turn as three people were killed after a peaceful protest the same day I called my father. In the coming days, the protests grew in size as students and members of the opposition group Table for Democratic Unity (MUD) called for an increased peaceful presence in the street in order to demand a change in the government, answers for the three dead, and even more recently as a result of the protests, to demand that the jailed protesters be freed. In a response, President Nicolás Maduro orchestrated a country-wide media blackout; Colombian news agency NTN24 which was reporting from within the nation was removed by authorities, and the president issued a threat to not allow CNN en Español to report in the country only to later recant the threat. Because of this, most of the news and communications available has come through Twitter and other social media sources.

Shortly after these develoments Agora, a group affiliated to S-CAR,  held an open discussion on freedom of speech, and immediately after the discussion I felt compelled to write about my perspective on the Venezuelan crisis, not only as someone who has been constantly interacted with the crisis through Twitter, but as someone who has been fascinated by how Twitter has shaped the message and course of the protests, as well as with what this can mean in escalatory conflict. Two recent examples are the social media trends at the height of the Arab Spring or even more recently in Ukraine.

As the protests developed after the events of 12F (February 12th), I was in the dark as to what was going on. The vast majority of tweets that my friends sent out either read as confusing announcements of where the next rally would be held, frantic tweets in all caps about what sections of the city were hearing gunshots or noticing anti-protest tanks, or charged rhetoric calling for either violence or peace. In this regard, the lack of any news outlets proved how powerful a media blackout, even with Twitter, could be. I was thousands of miles away, and the only updates I was receiving were 140 character quibbles that I couldn’t confirm or prove as fact or deny as fiction. The people soon found ways around this. During the third night of protests, for example, many of my friends began retweeting a link to a livefeed that someone had set up on Ustream. With the link I was able to watch a blurry camera feed of Caracas, listening to shots and insults in Spanish. During the rallies, people began to take pictures of the protests, accompanied with descriptions of the scene and a time stamp to prove that the picture was real. Another friend retweeted an article on how to protect oneself from many methods that anti-riot police might use. I was able to see this all developing live. In the context of Venezuela and other movements, it is not hard to see how the Twittersphere played a role, however large or minor. Not to be overlooked is the fact that Twitter also affected the rhetoric and overall message coming out of Venezuela.

Many users were able to share pictures showing ‘colectivos’ and members of the National Guard violently attacking unarmed student protestors, for example, allowing for the opposition to raise awareness of the human rights violations currently being committed by Maduro’s government. After the Venezuelan government issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, he gave himself in and many Twitter users actively began sending out messages echoing Lopez’s calls for peace and nonviolence. A fascinating perspective of Twitter’s involvement during Lopez’s arrest when we look at the pictures taken and retweeted of him. I began to notice that, visually, many of these images framed Lopez as a quasi Christ-like figure; in the images below you can see he is either being kissed by women as he is being taken away, or adopting a crucifix-like pose while being taken away. In a predominantly Catholic country where not only is religion a big part of the culture, but both Chavez and Maduro regularly refer to and use religious imagery rhetorically, this framing of Lopez’s arrest matters and shows how powerful Twitter and social media can be. In another example I noticed the fragmented reality of the rhetoric via Twitter, when a friend retweeted another picture (see below also), comparing Nazi Germany to Venezuela today. Considering that one of the labels Maduro has used to refer to the protestors is ‘fascists,’ it is very interesting that some sectors of the opposition would also decide to engage in such extreme rhetoric, especially when some sectors of the opposition have now turned to more violent means of protesting and retaliating at pro-government forces.

To say that social media has influence in many social movements is a fact we can all agree on; to see it happening in real time in front of you is an entirely different experience. It is scary and fascinating to know how powerful something like Twitter can be, and so when dealing with social protests and revolutions, or freedom of speech and the limitations placed on it, it is crucial to keep in mind how much social media can circumnavigate limitations while also fragment reality. In Agora’s last discussion we spoke about how, “Every perspective has merit. Every reader has an obligation.” I couldn’t agree more.

### Picture 1: A child shows his support to the Venezuelan Political Opposition. Photo: Flickr user Sojon