Yoani Sánchez: Pentagon babe
May 8, 2009

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Air Force General Robert Elder, who in November of 2006 was head of the Command, explained the reason for this new offensive deployment in cyberspace, at a press conference: “The cultural change is that we’re going to treat it [cyberspace] as a warfighting domain, and we’re going to actually focus attention and put priority on doing things in cyberspace,” he said.

In fact there’s nothing new, either in the Command or the self-promotion of the new Pentagon head who follows the same path as his predecessors in the Bush administration, nor in the offensive launched by the warlords. It’s the same strategic version for repression and subversion that the U.S. government has been implementing for decades, simply re-calibrated for a new era; the information era, whose spinal column is the Internet.

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Add to this the overwhelming publicity campaign for this and other sites for “dissident” Cubans in Internet search engines, a campaign that also cannot be done from Cuba. Google won’t allow it, out of compliance with the marching orders of the U.S. blockade against Cuba. In other words, if no-one here in Cuba can use a credit card to carry out a publicity campaign using Google Adwords [8], will the directors of the famous search engine help track the money as it courses through the Internet, promoting these kinds of websites and creating the stars of worldwide cyber-dissidence?

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The blog’s content is manipulative. The blogger calls for demonstrations using Twitter, social networks and other versions of Internet 2.0 that are barely used in Cuba, a country with extremely limited bandwidth and weak Internet facilities, because for one thing, its entire Internet connection is via satellite. The U.S. blockade has prohibited Cuba from accessing electronic commerce and digital technologies via an undersea cable, for more than a decade. Those in Cuba who connect at a rate of 30-40 Kbps can barely manage to check their email and dedicate themselves to priorities that are light years away from Yoani’s die-hard negativism.

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http://machetera.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/yoani-sanchez-pentagon-babe/

The site www.followerwonk.com analyze the profiles of followers of any member of the Twitter community. The case study Yoani Sanchez is revealing in several respects. An analysis of data from the Twitter account of Cuban blogger, conducted through the site, from 2010 reveals an impressive account activity Yoani Sanchez. So, starting June 2010, Sanchez has subscribed to over 200 different Twitter accounts every day, with peaks that could reach 700 accounts in 24 hours. Unless Yoani is spending all hours of the day and night on it-which seems highly unlikely, it is impossible to subscribe to that many accounts in so little time. It appears then that has been generated by a computer robot.

Similarly, it is found that about 50 thousand followers Sanchez are actually ghosts or inactive accounts, which create the illusion that Cuban blogger enjoys great popularity in social networks. Indeed, of the 214 000 accounts following @ yoanisanchez , 27,021 are eggs (dubious new accounts with no pictures) and 20,000 look like ghost accounts (from zero to three tweets since account creation date).

Out of the ghost accounts that follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter, 3,363 don't have any followers and 2,897 just keep track of the blogger, as well as one or two accounts. Similarly, some accounts present fairly strange characteristics- no followers, they just follow Yoani Sánchez and retweeted her over 2000 times.

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http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2012/02/26/quien-esta-detras-de-yoani-sanchez/#comments