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The last couple of days this site's Twitter account was repeatedly locked. The first complaint for doxing was filed for a tweet about geolocation (4 Cowley Street London SW1P 3NB) of Derwick Associates' main thug Alejandro Betancourt (read this encore). Twitter demanded immediate deletion of tweet in question for "posting private media". However, none of the media used was private. In fact, it had already been made public by the very Betancourt, and by the Daily Mail (among many other media). We have the impression that Twitter complaints' procedure is not manned by humans. Irrespective of counter arguments presented in appeal processes, Twitter refuses to 1) provide coherent replies, and 2) does not give any consideration to counter claims. Community managers of Betancourt-type of Venezuelan "entrepreneurs" have realised this, and are constantly manipulating Twitter to censor evidence of their criminal activities. Twitter might well be -unknowningly- aiding and abetting criminals.
After Betancourt's spurious doxing protest, Twitter demanded immediate deletion of tweets exposing criminal activity of Javier Alvarado Ochoa, Raul Gorrin, Diego Salazar, Luis Mariano Rodriguez Cabello, Rafael Ramirez and Baltasar Garzon. All of the above have something in common: all of them have either been indicted, arrested, are in jail, are wanted, or are part of ongoing criminal probes in different jurisdictions. Is this a coincidence?
As seen above, we are not talking parking tickets here, but theft of billions of dollars and thugs in wanted lists.
Twitter announced yesterday that it was removing from the platform "state-linked information operations". Venezuela got, of course, a special mention. Thanks to a collaboration with local partner Cazadores de Fake News, Twitter was able to identify "277 Venezuelan accounts that amplified accounts, hashtags, and topics in support of the government and its official narratives."
One of the "official narratives" that such accounts amplify is that related to Alex Saab. Cazadores de Fake News published an extensive report recently about Saab's propaganda-amplification operation. Furthermore, Cazadores published another report entitled "Intoxicando a Google" (intoxicating Google), which identified this site's editor as a target of defamation in Saab's Twitter ops, and explicitly showcased a few exhibits of such behaviour:
"La empresa de marketing digital Arroba Percepción, estuvo involucrada en la creación de una red de al menos 22 falsos portales de noticias entre abril y junio de 2021, que publicaron artículos de difamación en los que se acusó a los investigadores Roberto Deniz de Armando.info y Alek Boyd de Infodio.com de ser “extorsionadores“.
Alex Saab was arrested in Cape Verde, and extradited to the U.S. after a lengthy legal battle. Saab currently sits in jail in Miami, facing criminal charges based on an investigation published by this site in October 2013. But Saab is by no means the only criminal that has tried to put this website out of commission. Among Venezuela's investigative journalism platforms, this site and its editor are easily the ones that have gotten more flack over the years. The attacks haven’t been limited to just online defamation: we've been subjected to a barrage of legal threats, lawsuits, break ins, theft of laptops and outright terrorism, by what Twitter describes as "State-linked" actors.
Unfortunately, Twitter isn't bothered at all by the copious evidence of targeted harassment against this site. It crows about having eliminated 277 Venezuelan accounts linked to chavismo, but it pays no attention whatsoever to our appeals when targeted by close associates of chavismo. Worse still, it always finds against us in preposterous and baseless claims from community managers of people heavily involved in criminal activity, and whose involvement is all over the public domain. Twitter might censor us all it likes: it's a reassuring thing that our esteemed and loyal readers from law enforcement know where to find us.
