The US meta-corporation suspended several hundred accounts linked to the Cuban government last week. Accounts said to be related to the Bolivian government are also affected. The Facebook parent company accuses the accounts of operating political propaganda for the respective governments.
On the Cuban side, 363 Facebook accounts, 270 pages, 229 groups and 72 Instagram accounts with a total of over 650,000 followers are affected. These were “predominantly aimed at the local audience and the diaspora”. Meta, in the company’s latest “Quarterly Adversary Threats Report,” accuses them of spreading government propaganda and discrediting dissidents. Fake accounts and AI-generated images were also used.
In the case of Bolivia, the deletion involved over 1,000 Facebook accounts and 450 pages believed to belong to a group close to the ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS) party called Digital Warriors (Guerreros digitales). A total of two million followers are affected in the left-wing Andean country.
The recent account closures are in line with a number of other recent events. The Facebook account of the Cuban state research association “Razones de Cuba” was closed in October last year without giving any reason. During the local council elections on November 27, the Facebook page of the largest state news portal “Cubadebate” was blocked for the duration of the election day. A few days before the Twitter sale to Elon Musk, state and state-affiliated Cuban media channels were given a content warning on the platform.
“Four months later, we confirmed that this was not a ‘short circuit’ of the Facebook algorithms, but a planned action to limit the presence of media, professionals and supporters of the revolution on the networks,” the portal explained in a background article on the topic. The authors also referred to the bot campaign in the run-up to the protests in July 2021 and the scandal surrounding Facebook’s purchase of data from the British company Cambridge Analytica and the platform’s influence on the 2016 Brexit vote.
Regarding the recent Cuba meta-report, the group’s head of global security, Ben Nimmo, told AFP: “They used very basic fake accounts to share and like pro-government content. They were fake cheerleaders, if you will.” In addition, fake identities were created “to post criticism of government opponents” on the island and abroad.
As the journalist Alan McLeod revealed in a research for the Mintpress portal, there are apparently personal ties between the meta group and western security services. For example, Nimmo used to work as a NATO press officer and for the British Statecraft Institute, which claims to be working to “renew national security” in Great Britain. The institute is accused of using targeted disinformation campaigns on social media, which were directed against British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyin, among others.
From the Meta Group reported David Agranovich on Twitter about the bans on the Cuban and Bolivian accounts. In Bolivia, the investigation uncovered a “coordinated effort to use fake accounts to post in support of the Bolivian government and to criticize and abuse the opposition.”
In both cases, the blocks were due to violations of the meta-rules against “coordinated misleading behavior” (coordinated inauthentic behavior). These are intended to be directed against “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate towards a strategic goal”, but are not defined in more detail. In its “policy details”, Facebook mainly mentions fake profiles, but also the use of “pages, groups or events” that are used to deceive users.
Agranovich describes himself on his website as “an offensive counterintelligence specialist who worked for the US government as an expert on Russian foreign policy and intelligence matters.” Specifically, he was the head of intelligence for the United States National Security Council.
The US daily newspaper “New York Post” reported in December 2022 that the proportion of ex-CIA secret service agents at Meta was “particularly pronounced”. At least nine former CIA agents and six former secret service employees from other federal agencies are currently employed there or were.
For example, Meta’s chief “misinformation” manager, Aaron Berman, is a former senior analyst at the CIA who worked for the “company” for 15 years. On Twitter he introduces himself as “Misinfo @Meta, former @CIA”. Scott Stern, Meta’s senior manager for “trust and security risk intelligence,” has been with the FBI for more than seven years and has made “high-risk operational decisions for complex and ambiguous overseas terrorism operations,” according to his LinkedIn page. He joined the group in 2020 to help develop algorithms to combat “misinformation”.
Cuba’s government on Friday accused Meta of operating with “double standards” by “censoring” government accounts while condoning “anti-island disinformation and destabilization campaigns.” explained Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez in a statement on Twitter. Instead of deleting Cuban accounts, the company should “explain its own misleading and partisan behavior in allowing slanderous, stigmatizing and hateful campaigns against our country to be waged from Florida.”
Despite attempts to “censor” the country’s voice and “make the truth invisible”, Cubans would continue to “defend our revolution and our socialist system of social justice, including in the digital arena, in the face of harassment and destabilizing.” measures,” continued Rodríguez.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel expressed opposition “to the new hypocrisy and complicity of these companies with a well-known history of disinformation and destabilization operations on digital platforms against Cuba”.
In Bolivia, the Minister of the Office of the President, María Nela Prada, called for “transparency and clarity” on the part of the Meta Group. Decisions of this magnitude “should have at least been discussed with our democratically elected government,” said Prada. It is “mysterious” that such decisions were made against two left-wing governments of all people. “I say mysterious because you really have to ask yourself by what criteria you come to such conclusions and such reports,” Prada said. (America21)