面临该国几十年来最严重经济危机的古巴人周末走上街头。反过来，当局封锁了社交媒体网站，显然是为了阻止信息流入、流出和流入这个四面楚歌的国家。
除了政府支持的虚假信息运动和宣传之外，限制互联网接入已经成为世界各地独裁政权压制异议的一种屡试不爽的方法。在极端方面，像中国和朝鲜这样的政权严格控制普通公民可以上网的内容。在其他地方，服务障碍更为有限，通常会切断周围常见的社交平台选举大规模抗议的年代。
周日的抗议活动没有正式的组织者;人们在社交媒体上发现了这些聚集点，主要是在推特和脸谱网，古巴人使用最多的平台。成千上万走上街头的古巴人——抗议者和亲政府活动人士都是如此——挥舞着智能手机捕捉图像，并将其发送给亲戚朋友或发布在网上。
总部位于伦敦的互联网监控公司Netblocks的董事阿尔普·托克(Alp Toker)表示，周一，古巴当局封锁了脸书、WhatsApp、Instagram和Telegram。“这似乎是对社交媒体引发的抗议的回应，”他说。推特似乎没有被封锁，尽管托克指出，如果古巴愿意，它可以切断它。
托克说，虽然古巴当局最近放松了对互联网的访问，增加了社交媒体活动，但审查水平也有所提高。他说，切断不仅阻挡了外界的声音，还压制了“那些想要发声的人的内在声音。”
直到最近，古巴的互联网接入一直很昂贵，而且相对罕见。纽约城市大学巴鲁克学院拉丁美洲专家泰德·亨肯说，这个国家在2008年之前“基本上处于离线状态”，然后逐渐进入数字革命。他指出，最大的变化发生在2018年12月，当时古巴人首次通过从国家电信垄断企业购买的数据计划接入移动互联网。亨肯说，如今，超过一半的古巴人都能上网。
他补充说，许多古巴人现在可以随时随地实时访问互联网，并能够在他们之间共享信息。自2019年初以来，这种接触便利了岛上的定期活动和抗议，尽管规模较小。他说，作为回应，政府定期关闭社交媒体，主要是为了向公民和外国人隐藏其镇压策略。
据人权观察称，古巴政府还限制古巴的独立媒体，“例行封锁古巴境内许多新闻网站和博客”。
古巴正在经历几十年来最严重的经济危机，同时冠状病毒病例死灰复燃，因为它正遭受特朗普政府实施的美国制裁的后果。佛罗里达国际大学古巴研究所副所长塞巴斯蒂安·阿科斯说，现在的抗议活动是几十年来最大的一次，它“绝对和肯定是由古巴越来越多的互联网和智能手机用户推动的”。
加州圣名大学政治学助理教授阿图罗·洛佩斯-利维说，来自古巴内外的社交媒体帖子“不是叛乱的根源，但它们是连接该岛存在的绝望和不满的一个因素”。
洛佩斯·利维在离古巴总统米格尔·迪亚斯-卡内尔几个街区的地方长大，他说，古巴现任领导人比他的前任更能接受数字技术的经济潜力，但他可能已经计算过，如果互联网有助于恢复街道秩序，很大一部分古巴人会接受暂时关闭互联网。
在其他地方，政府在抗议之后或之前关闭互联网也变得司空见惯，不管是几个小时还是几个月。在埃塞俄比亚，2020年7月发生内乱后，关闭了三周。提格雷地区的互联网封锁已经持续了几个月。在白俄罗斯，2020年8月被视为被操纵的选举引发大规模抗议后，互联网瘫痪了两天多。几个月后的周末抗议活动中，移动互联网服务一再瘫痪。
十年前的“阿拉伯之春”期间，社交媒体仍处于早期，埃及、突尼斯和其他中东国家面临着社交媒体上播放的血腥起义，头条新闻宣布这些运动为“推特革命”，专家们就社交媒体在这些事件中发挥了多么重要的作用展开了辩论。十年后，毫无疑问，社交媒体和私人聊天平台已经成为必不可少的组织工具。反过来，限制他们也是压制异议的常规举措。在5月份的反政府抗议活动中，哥伦比亚卡利的互联网服务中断。
今年，亚美尼亚、乌干达、伊朗、乍得、塞内加尔和刚果共和国也出现了混乱。
但是独裁政权并不是唯一采取行动的政权。动荡时期，印度通常会关闭互联网。NetBlocks的Toker表示，古巴对互联网的限制遵循一种新兴的全球模式，并不总是发生在你最期待的国家，比如尼日利亚最近切断了推特。他说，从好的方面来看，世界对这些事件更加敏感，因为更容易远程监控和报告。
网络管理公司Kentik的道格·马多里(Doug Madory)表示，周日，整个古巴都离线了不到30分钟，之后有几个小时的间歇性大停电。他说，直到最近，大规模互联网中断在古巴非常罕见。
“在‘27N’抗议活动后，1月份仅移动服务就出现了中断，”马多里说，他指的是2020年11月27日古巴艺术家、记者和其他民间社会成员在文化部游行，要求自由和民主的运动。
亨肯说，他不认为政府会在很长一段时间内关闭通道，尽管这是它对持不同政见者和活动人士的一贯策略。
他说:“他们现在面临的问题是，这不是一小撮活动家、艺术家或独立记者——而是全国各地的一大群人。“所以妖怪从瓶子里出来了。他们想把它放回去。”
Cuba's internet cutoff: A go-to tactic to suppress dissent
Cubans facing the country’s worst economic crisis in decades took to the streets over the weekend. In turn, authorities blocked social media sites in an apparent effort to stop the flow of information into, out of and within the beleaguered nation.
Restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world, alongside government-supported disinformation campaigns and propaganda. On the extreme side, regimes like China and North Korea exert tight control over what regular citizens can access online. Elsewhere, service blockages are more limited, often cutting off common social platforms aroundelections and times of mass protests.
There was no formal organizer of Sunday’s protests; people found out about the rallying points over social media, mostly onTwitterandFacebook, the platforms most used by Cubans. The thousands of Cubans who took to the streets — protesters and pro-government activists alike — wielded smartphones to capture images and send them to relatives and friends or post them online.
On Monday, Cuban authorities were blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a London-based internet monitoring firm. “This does seem to be a response to social media-fueled protest,” he said. Twitter did not appear to be blocked, though Toker noted Cuba could cut it off if it wants to.
While the recent easing of access by Cuban authorities to the internet has increased social media activity, Toker said, the level of censorship has also risen. Not only does the cutoff block out external voices, he said, it also squelches “the internal voice of the population who have wanted to speak out.”
Internet access in Cuba has been expensive and relatively rare until recently. The country was “basically offline" until 2008, then gradually entered a digital revolution, said Ted Henken, a Latin America expert at Baruch College, City University of New York. The biggest change, he noted, came in December 2018 when Cubans got access to mobile internet for the first time via data plans purchased from the state telecom monopoly. These days, more than half of all Cubans have internet access, Henken said.
Many Cubans now have real-time, anywhere-you-are access to the internet and the ability to share information among themselves, he added. Since early 2019, this access has facilitated regular, if smaller, events and protests on the island. In response, the government has periodically shut down access to social media, mostly to hide its repressive tactics from both citizens and foreigners, he said.
The Cuban government also restricts independent media in Cuba and “routinely blocks access within Cuba to many news websites and blogs,” according to Human Rights Watch.
Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus cases, as it suffers the consequences of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. The protests now, the largest in decades, are “absolutely and definitely fueled by increased access to internet and smartphones in Cuba,” said Sebastian Arcos, associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
Social media posts from within and outside of Cuba are “not the root causes of the rebellion, but they are a factor in connecting the desperation, disaffection that exists in the island,” said Arturo López-Levy, an assistant political science professor at Holy Names University in California.
López-Levy, who grew up a few blocks from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, said the country’s current leader has embraced the economic potential of digital technology far more than his predecessors, but may have calculated that a large segment of Cubans will accept a temporary internet shutdown if it helps restore order in the streets.
Elsewhere, government internet shutdowns after or ahead of protests have also become commonplace, whether for a few hours or extending for months. In Ethiopia, there was a three-week shutdown in July 2020 after civil unrest. The internet blackout in the Tigray region has stretched on for months. In Belarus, the internet went down for more than two days after an August 2020 election seen as rigged sparked mass protests. Mobile internet service repeatedly went down during weekend protests for months afterwards.
A decade ago during the Arab Spring, when social media was still in its early years and Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the Middle East faced bloody uprisings that were broadcast on social media, headlines declared the movements “Twitter Revolutions" and experts debated about just how important a role social media played in the events. Ten years later, there is no question that social media and private chat platforms have become an essential organizing tool. Restricting them, in turn, is a routine move to suppress dissent. Internet service was disrupted in Cali, Colombia during May anti-government protests.
This year has also seen disruptions in Armenia, Uganda, Iran, Chad, Senegal and the Republic of Congo.
But authoritarian regimes aren't the only ones getting into the act. India routinely shuts down the internet during times of unrest. Toker of NetBlocks said the imposition of internet restrictions in Cuba follows an emerging global pattern and not always in the countries you most expect them, such as a recent Nigerian cutoff of Twitter. On the plus side, he said, the world is much more aware of these incidents because it's easier to monitor and report them remotely.
On Sunday, all of Cuba went offline for less than 30 minutes, after which there were several hours of intermittent but large outages, said Doug Madory of Kentik, a network management company. He said large internet outages were very rare in Cuba until very recently.
“There was an outage in January just for mobile service following the ‘27N’ protests,” Madory said, referring to a movement of Cuban artists, journalists and other members of civil society who marched on the Ministry of Culture on Nov. 27, 2020, demanding freedom and democracy.
Henken said he doesn't believe the government would shut off access for an extended period of time, even though that is its go-to tactic for dissidents and activists.
“The problem they have now is that it’s not a handful of activists or artists or independent journalists — it’s now a massive swath of the population all throughout the country,” he said. "So the genie is out of the bottle. They’re trying to put it back in.”
