UPGRADE DAY
Cuba on Friday sharply criticized Meta, Facebook's parent company, accusing it of “double standards” by “censoring” Cuban accounts on the one hand while allowing “smuggling operations” on the other. disinformation and destabilization” against the island.
The day before, Meta announced that it had deactivated fake pro-government accounts in Cuba and Bolivia used, according to the group, to discredit opponents and “liking” pro-power content.
“We reject the new hypocrisy and the complicity of these companies with a known history of disinformation and destabilization operations on digital platforms against Cuba,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel reacted on his Twitter account.
Ben Nimmo, one of the Californian group's security managers, explained Thursday during a videoconference with AFP that there had been an attempt to “hide who was behind all this”. “But our investigation found links with the Cuban government,” he added.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez denounced the “manipulation and double standard with which transnational (dis)information consortia operate against Cuba”, adding that a Meta official was “the former campaign manager of a anti-Cuban Republican senator”.
In Cuba, Meta deactivated 363 Facebook accounts, as well as 270 pages and 229 groups, and 72 Instagram accounts.
The American company “will have to explain its own insincere and biased behavior when it allows Florida to denigrate, stigmatize and provoke hate campaigns against our country,” Mr. Rodriguez continued.
Cuba will continue to defend the revolution, including on the “digital field in the face of harassment and destabilizing operations,” he added.
Mobile internet in Cuba, which has a population of 11.1 million, has been available since 2018.
Following the historic protests of July 11, 2021 when mi Thousands of Cubans took to the streets shouting “Freedom!” and “We are hungry!”, Havana had accused Washington of having fomented these protests via social networks.