Venezuela’s Chavez Can’t Silence Critical Television Station
May 31, 2007
Communist dictators beware. In the old world, you could control the media in your country with an iron fist, but now thanks to YouTube, silencing free speech is much harder to do.
Radio Caracas Television was until recently a television station that severely criticized the Chavez government. This week, Venezuelan “president” Chavez shut down the popular station and replaced it with a state-run group that painted a more flattering picture of his regime.
Thankfully, RCTV continues its broadcasts online via YouTube. And it remains vastly critical of an administration that leans more and more toward socialist dictatorship every day. Welcome to the 21st Century.
Teresa,
The Venezuelan government has reportedly started blocking Internet sites, such as the radical radio broadcast RadioNexxx. and many people are reporting difficulties accessing popular opposition websites such as NoticieroDigital.com and Noticias24.com.
I expect the Venezuelan government to block access to YouTube in the next days. Which will not do much to stop flow of information, as other video sharing sites exists, as well as ways to access blocked websites.
Luckily, the use of Proxy servers, and distributed network access have proven effective in circumventing these blocks. And users are already getting smart and applying these to get access to the remaining sources of news in Venezuela.
Dictators abhor free flow of information.
Technologies provide the means to bring down the autocrats pretensions to rule by force.
[...] media when there are newer avenues still open out there in the forms of YouTube and weblogs? Indeed RCTV is now online already. Moreover, what logic can be justified in a decision to shut down the messengers? And in our age of [...]