It all seemed to be working according to plan. Meanwhile, the service polled unsuspecting Cubans on seemingly innocuous matters, such as their views of slightly dissident rock groups, and data-mined the responses to assemble political profiles of those who responded. government could not become a major social network in Cuba without being exposed at some point, so the contractors looked for ways to hide ZunZeneo’s origins, including operating it from other countries and spoofing Internet addresses. People do like social networking and indeed, tens of thousands of Cubans signed up and started using the cheap service-at its height, the system hosted more than 40,000 users. One might have hoped that someone asked the question: What if we succeed? As one USAID document quoted by the Associated Press put it, the overall aim was to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” They used a secretly obtained list of half-a-million Cuban cell phone numbers to blast users, urging them to sign up and taking opportunities like carefully selected musical events as tests of ZunZeneo’s power.The idea was to gradually start introducing political messages and even, somewhere down the line, inspire Cubans to trigger Arab Spring-like mass protests. ![]() ![]() The agency also paid Havana-born artists to compose messages for the system, without disclosing the origin or the aim of the project. ZunZuneo was launched as a text-message based social network in which Cubans wealthy enough to own cell phones could follow and message each other for a mere 4 cents per text-cheap because USAID, through a front company in Spain, subsidized the cost. They attract a large user base, build community and are harder for governments to target.Īlthough the tightly controlled Cuban Internet had no such platform, ordinary cell phones with text capability were becoming widespread. On one level, it might not have seemed like such a crazy idea: They knew what Internet scholarship has shown: Non-threatening platforms that let ordinary citizens get together to banter about everyday life and exchange jokes are more powerful in the long run than openly political sites. This metaphorical poisoned cigar was “ZunZuneo,” a social network named after the Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet and conceived and built by a large Beltway contractor and its overseers at USAID. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the aim of nudging along regime change in Cuba. This time, every authoritarian leader in the world was just handed a golden talking point to justify their suppression of the Internet: a faux “ Cuban Twitter” secretly launched and funded by the U.S. So far, all have been unsuccessful except in courting disaster or embarrassment for the United States. efforts to relieve Cuba of its communist government have included invasion attempts, Mafia contracts, poisoned cigars and wetsuits and pirate TV broadcasts. But its impact on activists around the world who use digital tools to organize against repressive regimes feels devastating enough. government: At least this disastrous attempt to overthrow the Castro brothers did not almost lead to nuclear annihilation. Zeynep Tufekci is assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
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