[Witness spoke in Spanish, interpreted as follows:]
Of course.
We began in 2019 to monitor Venezuela via the conversation on X, which is most used for political content. In 2020, we saw how the digital communication strategies of the regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua were interconnected. They amplified hashtags like “against North American sanctions”—or European—blaming them for being responsible for crises. When there are conflicts in the region or elections, the communication is coordinated to amplify common messages for them.
We've seen how there is a pattern in the creation of laws to restrict content on social media, as mentioned by Iria earlier. We've seen how these governments co-operate and learn from each other. As with Sputnik, there are classes offered to communications students in universities in Nicaragua. In Venezuela's case, there's Chinese technology for social control, for surveillance and to promote disinformation propaganda online, but these narratives in Spanish are made stronger by authorities like Cuba or Nicaragua, and the discourse internally in Venezuela amplifies, in the regime's communications, positions that are in favour of other authoritarian states, like Russia and its invasion of Ukraine.
A campaign online was saying that what Russia was doing was for de-nazification, promoting propaganda as official information on social media. This is very dangerous, especially when there are no mechanisms to counterbalance these advanced structures for communication.
This affects information, and there is the intention to manipulate all of the information that they can't control directly. This is done by Venezuela's regime, but it's also coordinated with the Cuban regime and the Nicaraguan regime, and it's assisted by Russia and China.