Skip to content

Subscriber Only

The Revolution in Venezuela Won’t be Televised, Except on the Internet

TV is mostly silent about deadly protests. So people are turning to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook.

Bloomberg business news — Why Venezuela's Many Crises Keep Getting Worse

By

Nathan Crooks and

May 3, 2017, 9:00 AM UTC

Venezuela’s government is broadcasting an alternate reality to its citizens’ mobile phones.

Television is mostly silent about deadly protests as President Nicolas Maduro pushes for a new constitution. Instead, people are turning to visual forms of social media barely available to Venezuelans three years ago—Instagram and Snapchat stories, live videos on Facebook and Twitter, and WhatsApp chat rooms—to transmit and consume information.