Revealed as a fake news, the photo taken at the coast of the Egyptian city Alejandría, which they pretended to present it as the Havana’s seafront, has to do with Cuba in certain way. It is a photo from the days of the Arab Spring that took place in that nation back in 2011, where thousands of people, most of them in the photo, were manipulated through social networks.

As denounced yesterday by Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez at a press conference, is not the first time major tech companies offer their cutting-edge and expensive services to the U.S. administrations of the day to back the media war aimed at subverting order and fueling hatred in nations they dislike.

"I challenge the U.S. government to confirm or deny that the main political operators of the company that generated the campaign against #Cuba have received funding from the State Department and USAID." pic.twitter.com/SkBe0RNCfO

Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) July 12^th, 2021

We all remember the open statement made by Hillary Clinton in a televised interview about the subordination of Twitter to the U.S. government’s interests during the so-called Green Wave in Iran back in 2009. Back then, the then Secretary of State of the United States appeared on Television boasting of how her young personnel at the U.S. State Department forced Twitter to continue working despite a scheduled maintenance service.

And as it happened in Cuba last Sunday, most of the activists who were allegedly denouncing fraud in Iran’s elections, protests, and repression in that nation of the Middle East, were not in Iran, as they wanted us to believe, but in American soil.

From the technological perspective, the modus operandi of such companies is still the same applied not only in Iran, but in the Arab Spring. To unleash a campaign of lies, software known as bots are used. These robots execute automatic tasks by Internet through a command string or previous autonomic functions to assign a default role.

Thousands of fake user accounts repeat over and over again, like an unstoppable message cascade, the default lies aimed at developing conditioned responses in naïve recipients.

In the case of Cuba, the use of hashtags #SOSCuba and #SOSMatanzas, as proven by the Foreign Minister at the press conference, was hired by a company based in Florida, which, in addition to requesting a “humanitarian intervention,” pretended to make people believe that a sanitarian and political chaos was taking place in our country, which would have led to the collapse of the Revolution.

These fake accounts, which replicated from U.S. servers the script set by the machinery of media terrorism made up of websites on Internet and influencers from Miami, called to civil disorder by the use of violence and even encouraged to assassinate top leaders.

The disorders occurred in Havana led to the death of an individual and Twitter bears also responsibility in this regard.

But as stated by the expert on the subject Jaron Lanier in his book “Diez razones para borrar tus redes sociales de inmediato” (Ten reasons to get off social media): Every tech company fights fake accounts, but they also benefit from them. Although Twitter’s personnel may prefer, by either emotional or ethical reasons, that its platform were free of bots, such bots also amplify the activity and intensity of the service. The thing is that fake and massive activities in social networks affect real people and indirectly, a certain social reality is formed, which translate into money.”

He also said that there is an industry selling fake people. In early 2018, the price of fake people in Twitter was $ 225 USD for the first 25,000 fake followers.

Perhaps one day we will get to know how much money Twitter has made at the expenses of creating chaos and death in nations like Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya. All of them have been victims of the Arab Spring, which they attempted to replicate last Sunday in Cuba.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff