Through covert propaganda campaigns and pro-government networks of militants, bots, and trolls operating on the social network that is censored in Venezuela, the opposition leader lays out her view on how information is controlled on the platform.
La Hora de Venezuela
Over the past week, #LaHoraDeVenezuela has published three investigations that document how structures linked to the Venezuelan Ministry of Communication and Information (Mippci) remain active on X despite the platform being blocked. The reports showed how institutional accounts and public officials’ profiles have been repurposed and, operating in tandem with networks of militants, bots, and trolls, have also been used to amplify government propaganda and disinformation against figures that the Venezuelan ruling party avoids attacking directly in state media and official outlets.
Taken together, these findings depict a scenario of unequal access to X in Venezuela. While millions of Venezuelans can only access the platform by using virtual private networks or VPNs—if they can afford them or figure out how to set them up—state-linked structures continue to take advantage of that same platform to push narratives, criminalize opponents, and project their campaigns to national and international audiences.
On this issue, statements by opposition leader María Corina Machado, along with warnings from human-rights organizations and digital-rights experts, all point to the same diagnosis: that Nicolás Maduro’s government is trying to control the information Venezuelans are exposed to by combining censorship, the coordinated dissemination of propaganda, and the manipulation of social media.
Blocking X for the public, but using it against its opponents
The last time María Corina Machado appeared in a public appearance was on January 9, 2025, when she led an opposition protest in Caracas against the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro, after a presidential election held on July 28, 2024, that was heavily questioned by the opposition and by international observers. Machado had been barred from running, despite having won the opposition primaries in 2023.
Since then, Machado has remained under protection, facing threats from the Maduro administration. But she remains politically active and, in 2025, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There has never been a moment of greater censorship of freedom of expression and persecution of communication channels in Venezuela than the one we are living through today, whether open media, social networks, or even apps,” Machado said, referring to the wave of digital censorship that surged during the 2024 electoral campaign and intensified after the presidential elections of July 28.
That wave of digital censorship included the blocking of at least 79 websites, among them the sites of three fact-checking initiatives, including Cazadores de Fake News and Es Paja. Access to the social network X and to the encrypted messaging app Signal was also blocked—tools that many Venezuelans used to communicate and obtain information independently, according to a report published this year by the Venezuelan NGO VE Sin Filtro.
Yet even though the Maduro administration blocked X, propaganda networks that support him remain active on the platform, but in a “non-official,” covert way.
“They block X for people inside the country so that we cannot use it, but they still operate against me, against our cause and against our allies,” Machado reflected, referring to the information operation linked to Mippci that remains active on the blocked social network.
For Machado, this communication apparatus confirms that the Maduro administration has not abandoned the strategic use of digital platforms, including that same social network it censored. “The regime knows the power and reach of those media. In past years we would not have been able to win elections without using them, because they were the only thing available,” she explained.
A recurring target of pro-government disinformation
María Corina Machado is a regular target of online disinformation and stigmatization campaigns promoted openly and covertly by the government. The appearance of false claims about her intensified after the opposition primaries of 2023, when she began to emerge as a presidential candidate. After she was barred from running, a surge of narratives emerged aimed at eroding her credibility and sowing confusion about her political and personal situation.
In October 2025, the Venezuelan digital research organization Cazadores de Fake News published an inventory of more than 80 fact-checks of disinformation cases from 2024 and 2025, all directed exclusively at Machado—the highest tally the organization has recorded for a single person since its founding in 2019.
For Machado, these digital smear campaigns against her are a continuation of similar ones that had already targeted her more than 20 years ago, before social networks became popular. She recalls that defamatory spots against her were even broadcast on state media and billboards, displaying her face alongside hostile messages. “Not to mention the discourse coming from Nicolás Maduro himself, Diosdado Cabello, and each of their spokespeople, who also created their own echo chambers,” she recalls.
For example, according to an article published in September 2013 on the former blog Caracas Chronicles, an independent Venezuelan media outlet, the website of the National Assembly of Venezuela—then presided over by Diosdado Cabello—opened with a banner featuring Machado’s face, a headline in which she was described as “the hydra of coup-mongering,” and a link to a defamatory article published on the Assembly’s own site.
The text was signed by Dayra Rivas, then a journalist at the National Assembly and now Director of Digital Media at Mippci. Years later, in 2024, Rivas ran the @PiensaIA account, the same one that in 2025 changed its name and began posting “Dracarys” content (@UnleashDracarys), the anonymous account with a dragon avatar that became one of the main pillars of the current information operation linked to Mippci on X.
Stigmatization that crosses borders
Recent cases show that many of the digital attacks and defamatory hashtags in Venezuela targeting different people come from the same pro-government digital ecosystem.
In all of them, the same pattern repeats: media outlets (official or otherwise), propagandists, or anonymous accounts—some of them run by public officials—publish content that is then amplified in a coordinated way by networks of accounts that may be organic (run by militants) or inauthentic (bots and trolls), which at times coordinate to push multiple campaigns.
This is what happened, for example, with several defamatory hashtags promoted by the same information operation linked to officials from Mippci’s Digital Media Directorate. These campaigns were not only aimed at political leaders such as María Corina Machado, but also at Venezuelan activists and journalists like Martha Lía Grajales and Melanio Escobar, and even at the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.
The Venezuelan NGO Espacio Público warns that these practices distort public debate and “attest to deliberate and intentional harm against the information ecosystem and public debate, which ultimately has a direct impact on people: it criminalizes them, it frames them as political enemies.” The organization also warns that “these narratives encourage persecution, promote digital harassment and, in the worst cases, seek to legitimize serious human rights violations, such as the initiation of criminal proceedings or arbitrary detentions.”
But this pattern in the Maduro government’s disinformation and stigmatization campaigns is not directed only at figures perceived as domestic political adversaries. The same apparatus that has driven campaigns against Machado also operates outward, adapting its narrative to attack a wide range of international actors.
For example, the same covert information operation linked to Mippci has targeted covert campaigns against international political figures such as Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. This stands in contrast to the much more diplomatic tone found in public statements by Venezuelan officials or in coverage by state media outlets such as Venezolana de Televisión or Telesur.
“This shows that the regime is terrified of a firm stance to put an end to impunity in human rights violations, corruption and narco-terrorism, and therefore it does not want to generate any kind of tension or upset President Trump. But, clearly, its lobbying mechanisms to discredit his policies and those of officials in his administration are harsher than ever,” said María Corina Machado.
A persistent operation
On November 12, three days after #LaHoraDeVenezuela published its article about the anonymous account Dracarys, it was suspended by X. The account was not suspended by mistake or as a measure of “censorship” of the content it published: the anonymous account was clearly violating X’s Authenticity Policy, which prohibits false identities, misleading information, and inauthentic activity on the platform.
The suspension of the account, however, did not stop the operation. Since then, other newly created secondary amplification troll accounts from November have been identified, repeating the same inauthenticity patterns and replicating the same type of content. In addition, a new main, “alpha troll” account has appeared, stepping into the space left by Dracarys and which, based on its behavior, may be under the control of the same officials from Mippci’s Digital Media Directorate, or of people connected to them.
All of this confirms the persistence of the same information operation which—despite its limited virality—remains active on the social network censored by the very same ministry, and continues to do so in violation of the same authenticity rules under which its accounts have been suspended for more than a year.
Experts interpret this continuity as an attempt to sustain an increasingly ineffective narrative, precisely at a time when audiences are showing growing skepticism. In that vein, the NGO Espacio Público warns that the use of blocks on social networks and independent media, simultaneously with covert campaigns, “seeks to impose, directly and indirectly, a single narrative through the abuse of state power.”
From Machado’s perspective, although the Maduro administration may try to impose that single narrative, the impact of these campaigns is increasingly limited, even in the presence of an ecosystem of accounts pushing coordinated propaganda on social media. In her view, this change is due to the fact that Venezuelans have learned to detect online disinformation, to distinguish between what is false and what is true, and to identify propaganda campaigns on social networks.
“The response from citizens has been enormous: people have come out to defend the truth and to defend me, something I obviously appreciate with all my heart,” Machado recalled, underscoring the role of Venezuelan civil society as a bulwark against disinformation.
And regarding the use of disinformation by actors linked to the Maduro administration, she concluded: “I feel that it has instead become a boomerang that drags the regime down and discredits it even more.”
Journalism in Venezuela is practiced in a hostile environment for the press, with dozens of legal instruments designed to punish speech, especially the “against hate,” “against fascism,” and “against the blockade” laws. This content was produced by journalists who are in Venezuela and is being published taking into account the threats and limits that, as a result, have been imposed on the dissemination of information from within the country.
Cazadores de Fake News investiga a detalle cada caso, mediante la búsqueda y el hallazgo de evidencias forenses digitales en fuentes abiertas. En algunos casos, se usan datos no disponibles en fuentes abiertas con el objetivo de reorientar las investigaciones o recolectar más evidencias.
