On 12 January 2019, the main

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

s provider in

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...

CANTV CANTV () is the state-run telephone and internet service provider in Venezuela. It was one of the first telephone service enterprises in the country, founded in 1930. The largest telecommunications provider in Venezuela, it was privatized in 19 ...

, issued a

block Block or blocked may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting * Block programming, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting * W242BX, a radio station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States known as ''96.3 ...

against the

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, or a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. Examples include Wikipedia and ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Digitization of old content In January 199 ...

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

. All of CANTV's 1.5 million users were affected by the decision. The block was lifted on 18 January 2019, following widespread criticism against the state-owned company, claiming it was in response to the

Venezuelan presidential crisis The Venezuelan presidential crisis is an ongoing political crisis concerning the leadership and the legitimate president of Venezuela; the office of the president has been contested since 10 January 2019, with the nation and the world divided ...

. The block coincided with

Juan Guaidó Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez (born 28 July 1983) is a Venezuelan politician, a former member of the Social democracy, social-democratic Popular Will party, and federal deputy to the National Assembly (Venezuela), National Assembly representing ...

's claims to become acting president during the beginning of the Venezuelan presidential crisis. During the crisis, several Internet outages were reported as well as the blocking of multiple websites, including Wikipedia. Wikimedia Venezuela reported another block of Wikipedia on 23 January 2019.

Context

The Wikipedia block occurred in the midst of several

edit war A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

s on the

Spanish Wikipedia The Spanish Wikipedia ( es, Wikipedia en español) is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006 and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 2013 ...

articles of

Nicolás Maduro Nicolás Maduro Moros (; born 23 November 1962) is a Venezuelan politician and president of Venezuela since 2013, with his presidency under dispute since 2019. Beginning his working life as a bus driver, Maduro rose to become a trade unio ...

President of Venezuela The president of Venezuela ( es, Presidente de Venezuela), officially known as the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, Presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is the head of state and head of government in Ven ...

and

List of presidents of Venezuela Under the Constitution of Venezuela, Venezuelan Constitution, the president of Venezuela is the head of state and head of government of Venezuela. As chief of the executive branch and face of the government as a whole, the presidency is the hig ...

. The edit wars were in conflict over edits by both registered users and anonymous IP users, with different opinions on the re-election of Maduro as president of Venezuela from 2019, the assumption of the presidency by Guaidó, as well as about the chronology of the presidency. Initial edits claimed that Guaidó declared himself president, with following wars removing this information.

Block

On the afternoon of 12 January 2019, the ''

NetBlocks NetBlocks is a watchdog organization that monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the Internet. The service was launched in 2017 to monitor Internet freedom. Work Projects NetBlocks publishes original reporting on Internet governance ...

'' Internet observatory collected technical evidence of the blocking of all versions of Wikipedia in Venezuela. The restrictions were implemented by

, the largest telecommunications provider in the country. NetBlocks identified a major disruption to the network affecting the telecommunications infrastructure, which coincided with other restrictions affecting the ability of Venezuelans to access information in the previous 24 hours. It was believed that the reason was an attempt to hide or suppress the Wikipedia article of the newly appointed president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, who included him as "51st President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela." The information collected also shows several websites that had recently been restricted, meaning that political instability in the country may be the main motive for the control of the Internet. The Observatory ''VE without filters'' (Spanish: ''VE sin Filtro'') also collected information about the block, showing that it was an irregularly effective block, an HTTP filtering block according to the SNI (

Server Name Indication Server Name Indication (SNI) is an extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) computer networking protocol by which a client indicates which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the handshaking process. This allows a server ...

), preventing a connection to the server from being established with high frequency. The group reported that they thought that the block had ended on 13 January at 4:50pm, but the blocking methods showed up later, and they deleted the tweet with the incorrect information. Similarly, several media outlets suggested that Wikipedia directly or indirectly was taking sides with either group.

Reactions

Wikimedia Foundation

On 13 January, the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

said that they were opening an investigation into the ongoing event, and that they were still receiving web traffic and edits from Venezuela at the same time.

Wikimedia Venezuela

In a statement, announced:

Government

On 15 January,

spoke about Wikipedia and said that the opposition was "aiming to garner political power and become president of the Wikipedia Republic, of the Twitter Republic", in reference to the edit wars that took place surrounding the appointment of

as president in the midst of the presidential crisis. Maduro added "There they are with their Wikipedia and their

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

William Castillo William is a masculine given name of Norman French origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conques ...

, former president of the

National Commission of Telecommunications The National Commission of Telecommunications (Conatel) is an agency of the government of Venezuela that exercises the regulation, supervision and control over telecommunications in Venezuela. History The Telecommunications Act, enacted on June ...

(Conatel) and current deputy minister of International Communication denied the block of Wikipedia, and alleged that it was a

DoS attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

against the site, to discredit the Venezuelan government.

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wikipedia block in Venezuela, 2019 2019 in computing 2019 in Venezuela Crisis in Venezuela

Information operations and warfare Internet censorship Political and cultural purges Censorship in Venezuela