ZunZuneo: When The U.S. Developed A Fake Twitter To Control The Cuban Population

By | April 28, 2020

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(Radio Rebeide)

Hearkening back to the height of the Cold War, the ZunZuneo project was developed in 2009 by the U.S. Agency International Development, or USAID, as a kind of Cuban Twitter that used cell phone text messages to reach thousands of Cubans. The network was hidden from the country's notoriously controlling government through a series of shell companies, bank accounts, and computer systems with the goal of slowly bringing together the people of Cuba through online messaging to form a pro-democracy mob. None of its users knew that it was being run by the U.S. government, and it wasn't until long after they were ghosted by the service that (some) of the truth was revealed.

A Bare Bones Social Media Platform

This extremely simplified version of Twitter designed exclusively for the people of Cuba wasn't what Americans would recognize as an app because the Cuban government controls the flow of digital information with a monopoly on cell phone coverage on the island. There's limited access to the internet, and even text messaging can be pricey, so the developers of ZunZuneo created an SMS interface that allowed users to send a daily message to all of their followers. Similar to Twitter, the word "zunzuneo" is Cuban slang for a hummingbird's tweet.

When users agreed to use this service, however, they were inadvertently signing up for a clandestine messaging service designed by the USAID. The more people who signed into the network, the more people the government agency could contact with whatever messaging they were sending out that day, be it "Have a nice day" or "Riot in the streets."

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(Shutterstock)

Lured In With Innocuous Content

By using "non-controversial content" like messages about sports, music, and the weather, the USAID built its user base from regular people who wanted to keep up with the cultural zeitgeist. In the same way that you can log onto Twitter or Facebook and see updates from your friends and the greater world of entertainment and current events, ZunZuneo sent its users text messages about topics of their choosing. If you wanted to receive updates about a specific band—let's say Metallica—you subscribed to the keyword "Metallica" to gets news about the group in addition to status updates from people you followed through SMS messages. Over time, the USAID hoped to build a mass of followers to whom they could feed political content and form into "smart mobs" with the possibility of triggering a Cuban Spring.