Socialist dictator of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro claimed, without evidence, on Monday the WhatsApp messaging platform was used to “kill Iranian scientists,” referring to Israel’s recent military operations against Iran’s nuclear program.
Maduro also spuriously claimed that the messaging platform is being used to “massacre the Palestinian people.” Maduro levied his wild accusations against WhatsApp during the latest broadcast of his weekly show With Maduro Plus.
“Why do you all use WhatsApp? Oh, well, not all of you, okay,” Maduro asked his show’s audience. “I deleted WhatsApp from my life. Bye WhatsApp, go away WhatsApp, I don’t want you WhatsApp. I don’t want you, go away. Because WhatsApp is a spying system.”
Maduro continued, “Oh, it’s cool, I can send videos, I can make video calls, I’m cool. Oh, you’re cool, because they’re spying on you. They know everything about your life, Maria Antonieta [show co-host].”
The dictator then claimed that WhatsApp “has been used to massacre the Palestinian people.”
“It’s through WhatsApp that they locate and launch missiles to kill people. WhatsApp was used to kill scientists in Iran, scientists,” Maduro said. “All they did was research physics and mathematics. Scientists, they were killed because of WhatsApp.”
Nicolás Maduro has a “complicated relationship” with WhatsApp, a messaging platform owned and operated by Facebook parent company Meta and which, according to its website, offers end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging platform in Latin America. Meta, the application’s parent company, has not publicly commented on Maduro’s accusations against WhatsApp at press time.
Venezuelan state-owned companies, such as power company Corpoelec and telecommunications company CANTV, use WhatsApp as a tech support channel for customers. Maduro himself launched his own WhatsApp channel in 2023 alongside his own Spotify music playlist.
In August 2024, during the height of nationwide wave of protests against his regime’s fraudulent presidential election that year, Maduro “cut ties” with WhatsApp and urged his followers to uninstall the application on the grounds that it was allegedly being used to “threaten” Venezuelan socialists.
In reality, the Maduro regime has persecuted Venezuelans over “hateful” content published on WhatsApp. Recently, regime courts sentenced Venezuelan woman Merlys Oropeza to ten years in prison for publishing a comment critical of the regime’s corrupt CLAP subsidized food program on her WhatsApp profile last year during the 2024 protests.
“How much longer, WhatsApp? I’ll tell you. See? I told you, bye WhatsApp. Say it, bye WhatsApp. And let’s build alternative systems, too,” Maduro said on Monday.
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The Venezuelan dictator asserted that Russia has deemed the Telegram messaging platform, a competitor to Whatsapp, as “dangerous,” but conceded that he uses Telegram but not for “important things.” Maduro has his own Telegram channel that he has used since August 2024 as a replacement for his now inactive Twitter account after he banned Twitter from Venezuela.
“I use Telegram, but I don’t use it for important things. But it’s temporary. Telegram is for now,” Maduro said. “We are working to have a secure communication system that is not used to spy on people, let alone kill them. Right?”
“Because all those systems use it to find out everything about your life here [a smartphone]. Because people have their whole lives here,” Maduro said. “People pay here. People send videos and photos here. They communicate with their boyfriend, their friend, their girlfriend, whatever. Everyone knows everything here.”
The Maduro regime operates its own multi-purpose social media platform called VenApp, used by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to push socialist propaganda, especially ahead of a sham election. Local experts panned VenApp in 2022 as a failed attempt at social control, given a lack of significant usage among Venezuelans.
During last year’s wave of protests, Maduro had VenApp retrofitted with new features that allowed its users to report dissidents to regime law enforcement so that officials could “go against them.” Following a report campaign launched by Venezuelans, both Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store removed VenApp from their respective storefronts.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here
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