VENEZUELANS have been scrambling for dollars for weeks, taking refuge in the greenback as their own currency is in free fall. Rather than address the economic imbalances behind the bolivar’s plunge, the Government is going after the bearers of the bad news — it’s blocking websites people use to track exchange rates on the black market.

Cyber-activists say the crackdown goes to absurd lengths, even targeting Bitly, the popular site for shortening Web addresses to make it easier to send them as links via Twitter and other social media. For more than two weeks, access to the service has been partially censored by several Internet service providers in Venezuela, apparently because Bitly was being used to evade blocks put on currency-tracking websites.

The New York company says such restrictions have only previously been seen in China, which has one of the worst records for Internet freedom, and even then not for such an extended period. Opponents of Venezuela’s socialist government say the controls are designed to obscure reporting of the nation’s mounting economic woes.

“We help connect people with information and insight about their world,” Bitly CEO Mark Josephson said. “When someone is standing in the way of that mission, that’s not something we feel good about.”

Bitly got caught in the crossfire of Venezuela’s polarised politics a month ago, shortly after President Nicolas Maduro decided to block access to sites such as www.dolartoday.com that publish the black market rate for the bolivar, which is now 10 times the official rate of 6.3 bolivars per dollar.