14ymedio, Havana, 25 February 2023 — The official propaganda launched its counterattack this Friday against the US company Meta, which manages platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, for having eliminated hundreds of ghost profiles on social networks related to the Cuban regime. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parilla also offered the government’s vision, which attributes an “ideological bias” to the company and accuses it of “manipulation.”
An extensive article published this Saturday in Cubadebate by the official spokesman Randy Alonso Falcón admits that Meta closed, “in one fell swoop,” 363 Facebook profiles, 270 pages, 229 groups and 72 Instagram accounts.
Alonso Insists that the regime has witnessed with alarm the activity of “los chicos of Mark Zuckerberg” – the founder of Facebook – who have launched their “hunting dogs” to track the activity of hundreds of users financed by the Government, a situation which, according to a company report, occurred with similar characteristics in countries such as Serbia and Bolivia.
The objective of these hyperactive profiles is to “create the perception of broad support for the Cuban government,” says Meta, while, according to Alonso, the suspension of their accounts aims to “cut off the presence of the media, professionals, and supporters of the Revolution on the networks.”
In the usual terms, Alonso describes Meta as an accomplice to “the terrorist and subversive activity of the United States Government,” exposing with very poor arguments Zuckerberg’s “submission” to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and mentions profiles whose closures particularly hurt the regime.
This is the case of the page of Raúl Capote, editor-in-chief of the international section in the official Communist Party newspaper Granma, whom the CIA tried to recruit, he says, to carry out “anti-Cuban plans” in the cultural sector. With the same arguments, he regrets that another company, Twitter – managed by the South African-born tycoon Elon Musk – eliminated the accounts of propaganda programs such as Con Filo, Cuadrando la Caja and Chapeando. The media that kept their accounts were described as “affiliated with the Government of Cuba,” which annoyed the authorities.
Alonso claims that the suspension is not due to a “short circuit” in Meta, but a conspiracy to destroy the regime. In this way, the dissemination of content was lost, which, the spokesperson insists, was made by the 650,000 accounts that followed the government pages, the 510,000 affiliated with Facebook groups, and at least 8,000 Instagram followers.
“The individuals behind this operation published Spanish-language videos, audio clips, articles, photos, and memes criticizing members of the opposition and those who have questioned the government, including members of the Cuban diaspora in the United States and elsewhere,” quotes Alonso, alluding to the report published by Meta.
Finally, the director of Cubadebate summarizes the “state of digital” on the island this year, to conclude that 7,970,000 people have access to the Internet, 6,690,000 are users of social networks and there are 6,670,000 active mobile connections.
The Cuban foreign minister, in a Twitter thread, flagged the guideline followed by all the official press for the criticism of Meta. He asserted that the company “should explain its own inauthentic and biased behavior in allowing the denigration, stigmatization and hate campaigns from Florida to our country.”
“Despite the attempts to censor our voice and make the truth invisible, Cubans will continue to defend our Revolution and its socialist system of social justice, also in the digital field against harassment and destabilizing operations,” he snapped, with the usual rhetoric.
Reluctantly, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel joined the controversy hours later and limited himself to repeating, also on Twitter, that the regime was against the “new hypocrisy and complicity” of the US company.
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