Twitter’s censorship and double standard

Twitter joined smear campaigns against Cuba and included Cuban’s press among the media they refrain from recommend or amplify “certain profiles” and their messages.

When forwarding to the social network the link to a note, for example, from Prensa Latina Agency News, based in Havana, the following sign is added: “Stay Informed. This Tweet is associated with a media outlet affiliated with Cuba. Obtain more information,” and they do so without the slightest embarrassment about the censorship of freedom of information and press that they proclaim.

A link leads to a page where, as of August 2020, their selection policy is revealed: "where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressure, or control over production and distribution."

But next, it makes its double standards explicit: “State-funded media organizations with editorial independence, such as (sic) the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, do not fall into the category of media affiliated with the State for the purposes of this policy.”

These omnipotent “judges” define their targeting as “government profiles heavily involved in geopolitics and diplomacy,” “state-affiliated media entities,” and “individuals, such as publishers or journalists, associated with state-affiliated media entities.”

The censorship extends to websites that share links with the page that they label as such sanctioned media, while noting a difference between profiles of individuals who represent the government and institutional ones.

Although a list of over twenty countries includes the United States, France, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, they refrain from pointing out officials and personalities from those territories who are "strongly involved in geopolitics and diplomacy," except for some people “opposing" the real American power.

Nor do they stigmatize any of the dozens of media outlets publicly financed by US government agencies that coordinate campaigns against Cuba, under the pretext of imposing a model of forced "democratization" and changing the political system in the Caribbean island.

It seems that the company soon-to-be-purchased by the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, moves away from the principle that claims to promote: “Twitter is an open service that houses a world where all kinds of people, ideas and information exist.”

For the Spanish analyst Carlos González, quoted by Cubaperiodistas.cu, this manipulation of the algorithms to make some media less visible compared to others is part of “the construction of self-censorship,” that is, imposing a single story. “We have gone from Nazi graffiti to Jews to Twitter brands.”

The complaint from the leading website of the Cuban journalists’ guild states that the social network manages content like any other means of communication, and its editorial policy follows the guidelines of the United States government, but instead of moderating or "sugarcoating content," contents are filtered according to political bias.

This policy, conditioned to the tolerance or not of other ideological approaches that differ from the US, undermines the credibility of the social network, which lost lots of followers in recent times due to censorship and it paved the way for others yet small platforms that could well compete with Twitter in the near future.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSi Translation Staff