dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Benz just mentioned this on Warroom while discussing North Carolina Hurricane response beeing labeled as russian disinfo by the fake news and the blob

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-created-cuba-twitter-sow-unrest-reports-ap

GWEN IFILL:

What would happen if the U.S. government used social media to undermine a hostile foreign government? That may be exactly what the U.S. Agency for International Development tried to do in Cuba with ZunZuneo, a Twitter-style social media platform secretly controlled by the U.S. government.

An Associated Press investigation reveals that thousands of private Cuban cell phone numbers were used to circumvent tight controls on Internet communication and to gain valuable information about the users themselves.

USAID says that the program existed only to — quote — "create a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period."

Joining me now to talk about this operation is Jack Gillum, one of the reporters on the AP story.

Welcome, Jack. Good job.

Tell me, why would anybody, why would a government use Twitter in this way?

JACK GILLUM, The Associated Press:

So, we use Twitter here in the United States in many different ways, you want to talk to friends, you want to share information.

But we also use text messaging. It's a very basic function of our phones. Hey, let's go meet in the park at 3:00 today. Let's go hang out.

And — but, in Cuba, because of these tight controls on the Internet, it's hard to really use Twitter in the way that we would like to use it. So they needed to use a sort of a bare-bones messaging system, in this case SMS text messages, to recreate what, essentially, is a Cuban version of Twitter.

And the idea was, is to get people involved, you know, get buy-in so people were — it was a system where they felt comfortable using, they could talk to each other, and grow it from there.

GWEN IFILL:

Now, people who are not familiar with Twitter, this way, you could get followers, and you could get — you could reach a lot of people with a single text message. It wouldn't just be like text messaging other individuals.

JACK GILLUM:

Sure. So you would go, you would sign up, you would subscribe to different groups, so speak. And when you would send out a message, it would go through the servers, in this case sometimes to Ireland, to Spain, get sent back again, and then it would be distributed to the group.

GWEN IFILL:

And it was fake down to the point of you had fake banner ads on these sites.

JACK GILLUM:

Sure.

There was a very professional marketing campaign that went with this. I mean, when this USAID-funded project got off the ground in 2009, they sent out text tests — test text messages to say, is this something that we can do? Is this something that the Cuban government will approve of, or, rather, will they not notice and not get shut down?

By 2010, this ZunZuneo, project which is Cuban slang for a hummingbird's tweet, was — got off the ground, and it was something that they marketed, you know, just like any others, like Twitter or Facebook or any other type of social media platform.

Why was USAID involved in creating a Twitter-style platform in Cuba?

Apr 3, 2014 8:59 PM EDT