14ymedio, Havana, 13 September 2019 — Twitter started unlocking some of the official accounts closed last Wednesday. At the moment, the profiles of Granma, Mesa Redonda, Radio Rebelde, Dominio Cuba , the journalist Leticia Martínez Hernández and the deputy and director of the National Sex Education Center, Cenesex, Mariela Castro, have recovered their activity.
Among those who still have their accounts closed are Cubadebate , Cubaperiodistas, Canal Caribe, Angélica Paredes, from the Díaz-Canel press team, Rosa Miriam Elizalde, first vice president of the Union of Cuban Journalists and Enrique Moreno Gimeranez, journalist from Granma. Also on this list is the last and most relevant of the blockades, Raúl Castro, former president and current secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Around ten o’clock on Thursday night, Granma, the country’s first official newspaper and the Communist Party’s propaganda organ, announced the unlocking of its profile. “The Granma newspaper account , suspended by Twitter since the afternoon of Wednesday without any cause, was restored on Thursday afternoon with only 18 thousand followers. Twitter has been raising the figure, which we hope will return to the original 166 thousand.”
Hours later, the account has regained all its followers. Other profiles in networks, such as Dominio Cuba, returned to working status before Granma’s and denounced re-starting with zero subscribers, although gradually they were also being restored.
Dominio Cuba also complained that the US company has not apologized for the interruption of its activities.
For its part, the Mesa Redonda account, once again accessible, showed the messages that its administrators had issued during the moments when they had not yet realized their invisibility.
It remains to be seen if going forward the accounts that remain blocked will return to normal in the wake of the previous ones, although some followers regret that the suspension occurred coinciding with the first television speech by Miguel Díaz-Canel to announce the country’s emergency measures for the energy crisis.
Twitter’s Director of Global Communications, Ian Plunkett, told OnCuba that the company considered that the suspended official accounts violated the company’s manipulation policy that is defined as “the artificial amplification of the information through several accounts at the same time.”
The Union of Cuban Journalists, Upec, denounced yesterday the action of Twitter, which attributed to a policy of the Department of State directed to reactivate the opposition’s online militancy .
“The new thing is the massive nature of this act of cyberwar, obviously planned, which seeks to limit the freedom of expression of Cuban institutions and citizens, and silence the leaders of the Revolution,” said the organization.
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