The State Department answered questions about ZunZuneo, USAID’s “fake twitter” program for Cuba, at a press briefing by spokeswoman Marie Harf last week.
“We were not generating political content of any kind on
this platform,” she said, and the idea about getting subscribers at some point
to engage in street protests – “smart
mobs” referenced in the AP
story – was “from meeting notes between the grantee and the contractor,” at
a meeting where a USAID staff member was present. She wasn’t asked USAID’s view of the idea. Nor was she asked about polls conducted to
gauge the political sentiment of subscribers (where AP named the company and quoted
the employee involved) or what was done with the data.
The program ended when funds ran out, Ms. Harf said. She didn’t know why the grant was not
extended.
The program was not covert action, she said, for various
reasons, including that if anyone had asked participants about it, they would
have responded that it was a U.S. government program.
A USAID spokesman issued a statement yesterday
taking issue with parts of the article.
He says that there were “around 68,000” Cuban users at the program’s
peak. He does not address or challenge
some central aspects of AP’s reporting, for example the polling to gauge the
political tendencies of subscribers. One
can buy the idea that USAID didn’t originate the “smart mobs” idea and still
wonder why and for what purpose the U.S. government was collecting data on
Cuban citizens’ political leanings.
More reading if you’re interested:
Bush Administration USAID official Jose
Cardenas on the thinking behind the program, and the Washington
Post applauding the program.
The apparent Cuban Interior Ministry video
from February 2011 (with English translation) that shows what Cuba knew about
U.S. technology programs at the time, Juventud
Rebelde on other U.S. technology programs operating in Cuba, and Reuters
on the same.
The ZunZuneo Facebook
page is still open. It was active
from December 2010 to May 2012.
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