Twitter censorship and double standards

When forwarding the link to a note, for example, from the agency Prensa Latina located in this capital, to the social network, the following tag is added: “Stay tuned. This tweet is linked to a Cuban media outlet. Get more information ”, and they do That without the slightest embarrassment about the censorship of the freedom of information and the press they demand.

The link leads to a page where, as of August 2020, they disclose their selection policy: “Where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressure, or control over production and distribution.”

But then, he clarified his double standards: “State-funded media organizations with editorial independence, such as (sic) the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US, do not fall into the category of state media for the purposes of this policy.” .

He defines those “judges” able to target them as “government accounts heavily involved in geopolitics and diplomacy,” “state media entities,” and “individuals, such as publishers or journalists, associated with state media entities.”

Censorship extends to websites that share links to a page they designate as sanctioned media, noting the differentiation between individual government accounts and corporate accounts.

Although the list of more than twenty countries includes the United States, France, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, they refrain from referring to officials and personalities from those territories who are “strongly involved in geopolitics and diplomacy,” with the exception of some figures who are “inconvenient” to real American power. .

Nor do they stigmatize any of the dozens of media outlets publicly funded by US government agencies for coordinating campaigns against Cuba, under the pretext of imposing a model of coercive “democratization” and changing the Caribbean island’s political system.

The company that intends to buy the world’s richest man this week, Elon Musk, appears to be moving away from the principle it claims to promote: “Twitter is an open service that embraces a world in which all kinds of people, ideas and information exist.”

For Spanish analyst Carlos Gonzalez, citing Cubaperiodistas.cu, this manipulation of algorithms to make some media less visible compared to others is part of “herd consensus building”, that is, imposing a single story. “We’ve gone from Nazi graffiti to Jews to branding on Twitter.”

The complaint from a spokesperson for the Cuban Press Syndicate notes that the social network manages content like any other means of communication, and that its editorial streak follows US government guidelines, but rather than moderates or “composes content” like it normally refuses, filtering it for political bias.

This policy, conditioned by tolerance or intolerance of other ideological approaches that differ from the power of the North, reduces the popularity of a social network that has lost followers in the recent past due to censorship and opens up possibilities for the creation of new small platforms in the future that can compete with them.

ode / orm