The renowned Spanish activist, Juan Macías Tovar, has broken down the intense campaign articulated in social networks against the Cuban Revolution in recent days. The campaign was launched from abroad and has had as its referent the Argentinean activist Agustin Antonneti, a right –wing political operator who has participated in several operations against the left-wing processes in several Latin American countries.

The operation made an intensive use of robots, algorithms and recently created accounts for the occasion, with the objective of making chorus to the messages emitted by the referents issued by the campaign from abroad. The first account which used the HT#SOS Cuba, related to the Covid- 19 situation in Cuba, was located in Spain. It posted more than a thousand tweets between July 10 and 11 with an automation of more than 5 retweets per second.

The researcher points out that, one of the referents for the operation, is the Argentinean Agustin Antonneti, who is part of the right-wing Fundación Libertad (Liberty Foundation). Antonneti has been an active participant in the campaign of hoaxes and bots against left-wing processes in Latin America, among them, against the Bolivian Evo Morales and the Mexican Manuel Andrés López Obrador, as it was revealed in previous investigations, according to the sanction applied by Facebook to a number of accounts due to their political operations in the social networks.

Tovar points out in his accurate research that some campaigns were made for the artists to participate with a tweet under the HT#SOSCUBA, because of Covid- 19 related deaths and the lack of medical supplies in Cuba. Therefore, a tweet was posted which got more than 1 100 replies. A curious issue about that, after the analysis of these replies, is that most of them come from newly created accounts or from accounts with an antiquity of only a year. Over 1500 accounts involved in the operation under the HT#SOSCUBA were created between July 10 and 11.

International mass media would later be in charge of making visible the articulated campaign with the artists.

On Sunday, July 11, with hundreds of thousands tweets and the participation of many artists’accounts, the hashtag became a global trend. Meanwhile, the first protest in San Antonio de los Baños was transmitted by the United States under the account of the known user Yusnaby Pérez(a TV reporter’s alias), with thousands of retweets made.

The network analyst reveals that after analyzing the campaign hashtag, the most notorious issue was the repetition of exacts tweets which denotes the automatic patterns existence with thousands of tweetsa and similar number of followers and follows, by the followers gaining automatic system.

Another extremely visible element is the massive use of accounts, which show regular matrixes used in other campaigns such as in the State Hit in Bolivia or in the active presence of the Latin-American right-wing speakers such as Tersch, Cabal and Tuto Quiroga.

Tovar also reports the use of manipulated images or events happened in some other countries and the articulation of the network operation by using mass media that respond to the right –wing in the continent.

The three phases of the operation in Cuba.

First phase was to launch a campaign with the HT denouncing the collapse of the Cuban Health System due to the amount of cases and Covid-deaths-related claiming for help through false automatized accounts which mention massively to artists all over the world of which, some actually participated using the HT, for which the HT became world TT.

Second phase was to post on media that thousands of artists were gathering to a campaign that demanded for a humanitarian corridor to solve the situation in Cuba, just like they tried to do in Venezuela; situation realized in military conflicts only. Even when Cuba shows 15 times better figures than Spain, Ecuador or the U.S., or 40 times better than Peru, where this kind of campaign was not carried out.

Third phase is protests with few people involved in the beginning, but with an HT becoming world TT and with maximum repercussion that helped the protests to raise, accompanied by a ending campaign claiming for a military intervention from the U.S. to the island.

The research states the report of the Cuban authorities which affirms that this is about a orchestrated operation for the public digital space for which a huge amount of resources are gathered, with no improvisation. It is a well-design issue, supported by United States structures and agencies using labs designed to create this conditions and to accomplish their goals.

Source: Cubadebate