Cuba sharply criticized Meta, Facebook’s parent company, on Friday, accusing it of a “double standard” by “censoring” Cuban accounts on the one hand while allowing “disinformation and destabilization operations” on the other. island.
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The day before, Meta had announced that it had deactivated fake pro-government accounts in Cuba and Bolivia used, according to the group, to discredit opponents and “like” pro-government content.
“We reject the new hypocrisy and the complicity of these companies with a known history of disinformation and destabilization operations on digital platforms once morest 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 once morest 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 to denigrate, stigmatize and provoke hate campaigns from Florida once morest our country”, continued Mr. Rodriguez.
Cuba will continue to defend the revolution, including in 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 July 11, 2021 protests when 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.