CARACAS, Venezuela (BN24) — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s official YouTube account went offline late Friday, sparking accusations from state-run broadcaster Telesur that the platform had “eliminated” the channel without explanation.
The account, which had more than 200,000 followers, was widely used by Maduro to share televised speeches, appearances on his weekly state-run show, and messages aimed at supporters. Its sudden disappearance came as tensions between Caracas and Washington continue to escalate over U.S. military deployments in the southern Caribbean.
Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on why the account was removed. According to YouTube’s policies, accounts may be terminated if they commit repeated violations of community guidelines, including the spread of misinformation, hate speech, or content deemed to interfere with democratic processes.
Maduro, who has long faced accusations of undermining democracy, has been at the center of political controversy since last year’s presidential election. Opposition groups insist that tally sheets gathered by hundreds of activists showed he lost the race by a wide margin, but Venezuela’s state-controlled elections agency never published official documents to verify its claim that Maduro won.
In addition to political unrest, Maduro remains under criminal indictment in the United States. A New York federal court charged him in 2020 with conspiring to traffic cocaine into the U.S., and earlier this year the Trump administration doubled the bounty on his capture to $50 million. U.S. officials have frequently described the Venezuelan president as operating like a cartel leader.
Despite ongoing oil sales to the United States and limited cooperation on deportation flights, relations between the two nations have sharply deteriorated in recent months. Washington has deployed eight warships and 2,000 Marines to the southern Caribbean in what the White House described as an anti-drug trafficking mission. The flotilla, outfitted with long-range missile systems, has destroyed at least three speedboats allegedly carrying narcotics, killing more than a dozen suspected traffickers, U.S. officials said.
Venezuelan authorities, however, denounced the deployment as a violation of national sovereignty and part of what they claim is a broader effort by Washington to topple Maduro’s government.
The disappearance of Maduro’s YouTube channel adds a new layer of confrontation to an already volatile relationship, deepening tensions between the two countries as accusations of censorship and foreign interference mount.
