Twitter grants masks to officials in Mexico

Since Monday, Twitter decided to label the accounts of the Granma, Juventud Rebelde and Cubadebate newspapers, among others, as “media affiliated with the Cuban government.”

The immediate reaction of the directors of these media was annoyance because they know that the label is synonymous with manipulation, or worse, lies.

In the post-truth era, deception is a human right; lying is an act of conviction and hate is a message of love.

Twitter has also decided to tag officials from the following governments: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Serbia , Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates.

Inexplicably, Mexico is not on the list. Urge. Hundreds of officials contribute lies and disguise them as news; others attack their critics.

Out masks.

The excessive volume of information that circulates on social networks encourages disorientation, despite the fact that the headlines of newspapers have a position in the minds of readers.

Twitter tags help discriminate information. In the midst of the traffic of retweets, reading the label: “media affiliated with the government, Cuba”, encourages people to avoid reading it, to discriminate against the message or even to stop following whoever publishes said tweets. The tag sends a direct message to the brain to immediately interpret the message as the official version.

Cuban journalist Luz Escobar works for the digital newspaper 14ymedio, has lived in Madrid since last week, and today she will receive an award for her work. “I come from a country where the word ‘journalist’ is synonymous with ‘enemy’, and where the national media function as organs of propaganda” (Le Monde, February 25).

Luz Escobar is the daughter of the journalist Reinaldo Escobar and the blogger Yoani Sánchez, she is one of the journalists who have left Cuba after the penal code reform.

More than 220,000 Cubans have left their country to travel to the United States between September 2021 and October 2022, according to figures from the US Department of Border Protection.

Abraham Jiménez Enoa, founder and former director of the online magazine El Estornudo arrived in Barcelona last January. The Díaz-Canel government sent him a message: “exile or prison.”

“It has never been easy to carry out the work of a journalist in Cuba because, according to the Constitution, it is an activity linked to the Communist Party and all those who exercise it outside that framework are considered illegal,” he explains to Le Monde.

This is the panorama of a country idealized by dogmas incubated in the last century. A country in which studying journalism is a subversive act.

@faustopretelin