The Minister for Communication and Information and Vice President of Communication, Culture and Tourism, Freddy Ñáñez, said that people in Venezuela can live without the social network X.
He expressed this in a program broadcast by Laiguana.tv., in which he indicated that on this social network “the majority of active accounts and the majority of users who interact with the accounts are bots.”
He referred to statistics on digital consumption in the country, and in this regard pointed out that the social network most used in the country is Facebook, with 22 million profiles, of which 18.1 million are active.
Likewise, there are 8 million Tik Tok accounts in Venezuela; 7 million 900 thousand users on Instagram; 30 million 342 thousand YouTube subscribers; and in X 2 million 700 thousand people or accounts.
Suspension of X
Regarding the validity of the suspension of social network X, he said that “what is appropriate is for this company to present its representative in the country and accept Venezuelan laws.
“We are still waiting,” he said, commenting, “what is going to happen in Venezuela is that new social networks will come in.”
Networks usurp the function of communication messiahs
Ñáñez said that social media has usurped the role of the media, the State and institutions, “which puts democracy as we know it in jeopardy and makes it difficult to develop.”
“Social media, as a communications technology, has reached places no other technology, no other institution known in the world, not even religions, has ever reached before,” he said.
“They have reached the point of being able to whisper to each person in each country what the algorithm determines that person wants to hear, thereby dissolving the possibility of a collective truth, of a more or less stable state of opinion, and therefore dissolving the ability to have governance within the social spectrum,” he explained.
Legislating networks
For this reason, Ñáñez believes that the time has come to legislate on this matter in the country and to seriously assume that in the academic, legal, cultural and political fields a space of thought can be built that considers these technologies.
For the minister, citizens must be informed about what the digital world and algorithms are all about, so that they have the tools to debate the problem in depth and put a stop to it.
State of consciousness
He stressed that it is not about blocking or banning platforms, “it is about creating a state of awareness about these tools that are very dangerous for individual health and for democracy.”
