Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase could spell end of the Cuban dictatorship’s Twitter bot army
https://www.cubanet.org/noticias/twitter-ciberclarias-cubanas-en-la-mira-de-elon-musk/
Translated Excerpt:
Cuban bot accounts in the crosshairs of billionaire Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the South African entrepreneur now U.S. citizen and new owner of Twitter, said in a recent interview that he will work to eliminate bots on the social media platform he recently purchased for $44 billion.
Musk’s plans for the blue bird platform call for a “trustworthy system that is as inclusive as possible,” which may spell the end to thousands of bot accounts deployed by the Cuban regime in this virtual community.
“I publically promised that we have to get rid of the bots, the trolls, the scams and everything. Obviously, this is diminishing the user experience and we don’t want people to be deceived out of their money and those kinds of things,” said the entrepreneur at the 2022 Met Gala in New York on Monday.
“I’m on the warpath! If anyone is operating an army of bots and trolls, I am definitely their enemy!” the businessman added.
The bots or automated accounts that generally work to get specific topics or events to trend are a problem the social media platform has tried to eradicate without success. According to investigations, regimes such as those in Venezuela, Russia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, employ this type of digital manipulation to distort reality or gain visibility in support of those regimes.
On the Caribbean island, those who work to create fake accounts with the objective of placing content of interest on social media are known as “Ciberclarias.” In general, they’re State Security agents or graduates from the University of Computer Science (UCI).
Creating bots on Twitter is part of what they call in Cuba the “media war” and consists of trying to censor anyone on social media that criticizes the regime and get content that supports the regime to go viral.