Role Played by Twitter and Instagram in Inciting Fake News about Cuba
"I have irrefutable evidence that the majority of
users who took part in this campaign were in the
United States and that automated systems were used
to viralize the content, without being penalized
by Twitter," Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs
Bruno Rodríguez stated on July 13 following the
failed July 11 attempt at fomenting a
counter-revolutionary rebellion in Cuba. Evidence
of this unconventional warfare against Cuba was
irrefutable. Even U.S. official media such as Newsweek
published the evidence of the use of fake accounts
and bots to spread false news about what was going
on in Cuba and incite violence in that country.
Spanish disinformation expert Julián Macías
Tovar, the director of Pandemia Digital, found
that around 2,000 Twitter accounts were created on
July 10 and 11 that used the hashtag #SOSCuba. He
analyzed more than two million tweets using the
hashtag. His research and logs of the tweets and
retweets can be found on Twitter.
Macías Tovar reported that the hashtag was first
used on July 5, with the first tweet coming from
Spain. This account posted over 1,000 tweets on
July 10 and 11. Evidence shows that by using
automated systems posting at the rate of five
retweets per second, the number climbed to 100,000
on July 9, 500,000 on July 10, 1.5 million on July
11 and two million on July 12.
While the first tweets came from Spain, they
involved the Miami mafia, as well as others such
as an individual from the reactionary Argentinian
organization Fundación Libertad known to have
carried out similar campaigns against the former
Bolivian president Evo Morales and the current
president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(AMLO).
Fake images flooded social networks in several
countries, using thousands of newly created
accounts. Instagram alone had some 120,000 photos
using the hashtag. Images from all over the world
were used under the pretext that they were photos
of anti-government protests in Cuba. These
included photos from Egypt during the Arab Spring
in 2011 and Cuba's May Day celebrations in 2018.
Photos of the Cuban people in the streets
defending revolutionary Cuba were also presented
as anti-government protests, and reprinted by
major U.S. media.
Fake news reports were spread including the
absurd claims that Raúl Castro had fled to
Venezuela, that a provincial Communist Party
secretary had been "captured" by protestors, and
that Venezuela would be sending troops to Cuba.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called it "media
terrorism."
"It's clear that there are bots involved in the
conversation about what's going on in Cuba," Sam
Wooley, project director for propaganda research
at the University of Texas at Austin's Centre for
Media Engagement, told Newsweek.
What can be clearly seen is that first protests
were called and orchestrated from the U.S., using
some Cuban artists recruited by the U.S. which has
been pouring millions of dollars into providing
"grants" for Cuban artists. Then false accounts of
the events were constructed and spread through
social media using the fake accounts and bots, and
picked up by the official media in various
countries including Canada. False claims that
people were being killed or "disappeared" were
circulated, followed by acts of vandalism. At the
same time, almost all Cuban public media were
subject to intermittent attacks with denial of
services.
There is widespread agreement among academics who
study social media that Twitter and Facebook are
rife with "influence operations." This refers to
the use of fake accounts and multiple accounts
with one user to create a deluge of tweets and
"shares" through automated systems or bots. This
"engagement" is presented as arising from real
people and as mass participation used to establish
what is "trending."
Not only are fake accounts used to manufacture
"engagement," but followers can be purchased,
either entirely fake ones or by using the names of
real people without their knowledge or consent.
The New York Times reported in 2018 that
as federal and state authorities were
investigating the sellers of artificial followers
and other fraudulent social media engagements,
more than a million followers disappeared from the
accounts of dozens of prominent Twitter users,
including a member of the Twitter board of
directors. The people losing followers had
purchased them from a company called Devumi.
This article was published in
Volume 51 Number 21 - November 7, 2021
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2021/Articles/MS51214.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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