Twitter’s censorship and double standards

Havana, Oct 26 (Prensa Latina) Twitter joined the campaigns against Cuba and included the Caribbean nation's press among the media from which it refrains from recommending or amplifying "certain accounts" and their messages.

When forwarding to the social network the link to a note, for example, from the Havana-based Prensa Latina Agency, the following label is added: “Stay Informed. Cuba state-affiliated media. Get more information,” and they do so without the slightest blush for the censorship of freedom of information and press that they proclaim.

A link leads to a page where, since August 2020, they reveal their selection policy, ” where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

But it then goes on to make explicit its double standards, “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.”

These omnipotent “judges” define their targeting as falling on “government accounts heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy,” “state-affiliated media entities,” and “individuals, such as editors or journalists, associated with state-affiliated media entities.”

The censorship extends to websites that share links to the page they label as such sanctioned media while cautioning a differentiation between accounts of individuals representing the government and institutional ones.

Although a list of more than a score of countries includes the United States, France, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, they refrain from singling out officials and personalities from those territories who are “heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy,” except for some characters “uncomfortable” for the US royal power.

Nor do they stigmatize any of the dozens of media publicly financed by US Government agencies to coordinate campaigns against Cuba, under the pretext of imposing a model of forced “democratization” and changing the political system in Cuba.

It seems that the company that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, may be buying this week, is moving away from the principle it claims to promote, “Twitter is an open service that hosts a world where all kinds of people, ideas and information exist.”

For Spanish analyst Carlos Gonzalez, quoted by Cubaperiodistas.cu, this manipulation of algorithms to make some media less visible than others is part of “the construction of herd unanimity,” that is, imposing a single narrative. “We have gone from Nazi graffiti to Jews, to Twitter brands.”

The denunciation by the website of the Cuban journalists’ guild, exposes that the social network manages content like any other media, and its editorial line follows the guidelines of the US Government, but instead of moderating or “making up content” as it usually rejects, it filters it according to political bias.

This policy, conditioned to the tolerance or not of other ideological approaches that differ from the northern power, reduces the popularity of the social network, which in the recent past has lost followers due to censorship, and opened possibilities for the creation of new small platforms that could compete with them in the future.