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Between January and June 2023, the Díaz-Canel regime continued to impose itself in the social conversation on Twitter, now X, in the internal trends of the island; but the tags coming from Venezuela managed to generate more messages inside Cuba than the Caribbean country’s own narratives.
In the report (January-June 2023) we demonstrate how the Cuban regime imposes its narrative in networks and relying on the positioning of trends together with the Venezuelan regime, proving once again the communicational collaboration between these countries to manipulate the digital socio-political conversation.
How did the conversation evolve?
At ProBox we registered 396 socio-political hashtags as trending on X in Cuba between January and June 2023, totaling around 37,734,254 tweets. Detailing the conversation, we identified that only 350 of them belong directly to Cuban actors, accumulating just over 9 million tweets.
The Cuban regime positioned the highest number of trends with 339, mainly talking about anniversaries and propaganda of the Revolution; followed by the Ministry of Communication and Information of Venezuela (MIPPCI) with 27 trends and social protest promoted by citizens with 11. However, Venezuelan trending topics generated 75.5% of the total messages of the first half of the year in Cuba.
In addition to this, in May we registered 122 socio-political tags positioned on the island, being the month with the highest number of trends in this country since we started monitoring it in 2021.
The voice of protest among the officialist noise
Between January and April no protest trends were positioned in Cuba; however, in May we registered 10 trends promoted by civil society, mainly due to the protests in Guantanamo when hundreds of Cubans took to the streets due to the lack of food. In response to the dissemination of videos on social networks reporting the protests, the regime cut off the island’s communications and referred to the event as an “altercation between drunken people”.
Citizens managed to position 11 hashtags between January and June 2023, totaling around 67,539 tweets.
What didn’t the regime talk about?
The Cuban regime imposed itself in the conversation in an inauthentic way thanks to the use of troops of users coordinated among themselves to promote their narratives and massify their fiction online over citizen denunciation.
As a result, issues such as the unelected vote in the country’s legislative elections and the protests over the fuel crisis on the island were overshadowed not only by the labels of the Díaz-Canel regime but also by the support of these twitter troops in the promotion of narratives from Venezuela and Nicaragua.
These investigations help to better understand the national panorama in order to make visible the voice of citizens and their reality in the sea of inauthentic messages and labels promoted by the State. Remember, on social media not everything massive is real.
For more information on socio-political manipulation on social media, you can follow us everywhere at @ProBoxVE.
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