The so­cial me­dia has risen to the fore af­ter Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties warned me­dia hous­es against re­port­ing on re­cent protests and threat­ened high fines, claims busi­ness­man Austin Agho.Agho was among speak­ers at yes­ter­day's UWI fo­rum on the Venezue­lan cri­sis."The in­ten­tion of the Maduro ad­min­is­tra­tion is for the world not to know about this," Agho said, dis­play­ing a pic­ture of a fe­male stu­dent's blood-cov­ered face, her eye blown away by gun­shots.

She died, Agho added. He dis­played oth­er pic­tures of clash­es and law en­force­ment of­fi­cers' al­ter­ca­tions with civil­ians."Right now the on­ly thing pre­vent­ing the Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties from un­der­tak­ing re­pres­sion by force is the so­cial me­dia," he added.Agho said the ve­rac­i­ty of every­thing on so­cial me­dia had to be rec­ti­fied but he main­tained the rise of so­cial me­dia in the sit­u­a­tion had oc­curred be­cause of ne­ces­si­ty as de­ci­sions had been tak­en out of peo­ple's hands and it was nec­es­sary to get the mes­sage out.

He said there were 3.6 mil­lion In­ter­net sub­scribers in Venezuela and 12.9 mil­lion users. He said Face­book has 9.6 mil­lion sub­scribers in Venezuela and three mil­lion on Twit­ter.He said even af­ter op­po­si­tion group leader, Leopol­do Lopez, was de­tained, his wife con­tin­ued to keep his mes­sages go­ing via Twit­ter.UWI's Ar­man­do Gar­cia said cur­rent pro­tes­tors have more pow­er now than in pre­vi­ous un­rests due to the so­cial me­dia cir­cu­la­tion.Agho said Venezue­lan jour­nal­ists have al­so protest­ed lack of newsprint and nine news­pa­pers in one state have stopped pub­lish­ing or re­duced page con­tent due to the sit­u­a­tion. (GA)