Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Let’s hand it to the U.S. government: At least this disastrous attempt to overthrow the Castro brothers did not almost lead to nuclear annihilation. But its impact on activists around the world who use digital tools to organize against repressive regimes feels devastating enough.

Over the years, U.S. efforts to relieve Cuba of its communist government have included invasion attempts, Mafia contracts, poisoned cigars and wetsuits and pirate TV broadcasts. So far, all have been unsuccessful except in courting disaster or embarrassment for the United States. This time, every authoritarian leader in the world was just handed a golden talking point to justify their suppression of the Internet: a faux “ Cuban Twitter” secretly launched and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the aim of nudging along regime change in Cuba.


This metaphorical poisoned cigar was “ZunZuneo,” a social network named after the Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet and conceived and built by a large Beltway contractor and its overseers at USAID. On one level, it might not have seemed like such a crazy idea: They knew what Internet scholarship has shown: Non-threatening platforms that let ordinary citizens get together to banter about everyday life and exchange jokes are more powerful in the long run than openly political sites. They attract a large user base, build community and are harder for governments to target.

Although the tightly controlled Cuban Internet had no such platform, ordinary cell phones with text capability were becoming widespread. ZunZuneo was launched as a text-message based social network in which Cubans wealthy enough to own cell phones could follow and message each other for a mere 4 cents per text—cheap because USAID, through a front company in Spain, subsidized the cost. The agency also paid Havana-born artists to compose messages for the system, without disclosing the origin or the aim of the project. They used a secretly obtained list of half-a-million Cuban cell phone numbers to blast users, urging them to sign up and taking opportunities like carefully selected musical events as tests of ZunZeneo’s power.The idea was to gradually start introducing political messages and even, somewhere down the line, inspire Cubans to trigger Arab Spring-like mass protests. As one USAID document quoted by the Associated Press put it, the overall aim was to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

One might have hoped that someone asked the question: What if we succeed?

People do like social networking and indeed, tens of thousands of Cubans signed up and started using the cheap service—at its height, the system hosted more than 40,000 users. But a platform secretly run by the U.S. government could not become a major social network in Cuba without being exposed at some point, so the contractors looked for ways to hide ZunZeneo’s origins, including operating it from other countries and spoofing Internet addresses. Meanwhile, the service polled unsuspecting Cubans on seemingly innocuous matters, such as their views of slightly dissident rock groups, and data-mined the responses to assemble political profiles of those who responded. It all seemed to be working according to plan.

ZunZuneo’s growing popularity posed a problem, though: The cost of all those texts was adding up. So USAIDtried to lure an outside CEO into taking it over, and invited Silicon Valley companies invest in it. There were no takers. After all, what sane company would take over an operation that involved forking over tens of thousands of dollars to the Cuban government in perpetuity to subsidize texts about the weather or music concerts? By mid-2012, the money had run out, and the service died.

One might have also hoped that someone in the U.S. government asked the question: What if we fail? What if we are found out?

The answer, I’m afraid, can be found in the fear and outrage that slowly filled my Facebook page on Thursday as online activists around the world found out about the project—a boneheaded idea tailor-made to taint social media as a tool of the United States, and the activists as useful idiots at best, and traitors at worst.

***

In 2014, there are three main types of regimes that try to suppress the Internet: the abstainer, the 800-pound gorilla and the frantic fence-builder.

First, there is North Korea, a textbook abstainer. No Internet, no problem. Also, no food, no electricity and not much else but massive misery in a clownish dictatorship, so this is not what most wannabe authoritarians are aspiring towards.

The second model is that of China, which built the Internet as a walled garden—vigorously censored and controlled by a combination of technology and tens of thousands of digital minions—from the ground up. For most governments, though, this 800-pound gorilla model is far too resource-intensive. It also takes an early start, extensive planning and the prophylactic effect of a steadily growing economy to keep dissent to a manageable minimum—a combination of factors unique to China.

Most countries with authoritarian leanings, with millions of users already on the Internet, fall into a third category. They didn’t have China’s foresight or resources, and are frantically trying to build fences around some corners of the Internet. Instead of never really plugging in, like North Korea, or establishing complete control from the start, like China, the fence-builders throw up selective blocks to services like Twitter or YouTube, and filter certain objectionable content from the Web. But more important than these technical measures, which are easily evaded, are the political ones: The fence-builders portray social media as immoral, or worse: tools of the U.S. government. These countries are where the real battle for free speech online is being waged, where millions of activists and ordinary people often operate in a legal gray zone, with few protections when they step over the line.

Take Turkey. For the past 12 years, it has been ruled by the Justice and the Development Party, (AKP is its Turkish acronym) and led by its charismatic leader, Tayyip Erdogan, who carried the party through three election victories and rapid economic growth. Internet use in Turkey has exploded over that time, especially in big cities and among young people. Despite its democratic veneer, the AKP has grown increasingly hostile to free speech: Under Erdogan, the government has tightened its control over the mass media (though some outlets are once again trying to chart a somewhat independent course).

In the meantime, though, a free-speech culture slowly took root on the Turkish Internet, especially on U.S.-based social media platforms as well as on homegrown sites. Over the past year, people have harnessed that energy to challenge the AKP. First, it was huge, social media-fueled protests over a development project in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. More recently, lurid details of a corruption scandal allegedly implicating Erdogan emerged online, followed by a sensitive leak of conversations about a possible Turkish incursion into Syria, which were posted on YouTube.

Erdogan has responded swiftly and angrily. During the Gezi Park protests, he called Twitter “the worst menace to society” and recently pushed through a comprehensive Internet censorship and surveillance law. In March, right before crucial local elections, the government first blocked Twitter and then YouTube, only to be met with massive defiance from the country’s millions of Internet users (in fact, there were more Tweets from Turkey the day after the ban than the day before it).

Many commentators thought Erdogan had lost his mind. But the agile and politically astute Turkish leader was taking the third path. He took to political rallies and television to rage against social media, preaching to his base of socially conservative lower- and middle-class Turks. He railed against Facebook and YouTube but especially Twitter, accusing it of fomenting unrest in Ukraine and Egypt while doing America’s bidding. When Turkey’s high court struck down the government’s Twitter ban, Erdogan said the justices “had put aside our national values to defend an American company.” In the end, the strategy worked: His base stuck by him and the AKP once again emerged with a plurality in the local elections.

And Turkey’s not alone. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is forcing all NGOs that receive any funds from international sources to identify themselves as “foreign agents”—i.e., spies—and shutting down dissident websites. Pro-Kremlin media outlets have done their part, publishing blacklists of news websites to avoid. Authoritarian regimes from Azerbaijan to Indonesia have followed pretty much the same playbook.

Until now, though, in trying to paint their online critics as “foreign agents,” these governments were grasping at straws. For example, lacking a better model, Ankara’s AKP mayor, Melih Gokcek, who became the Turkish government’s most vocal spokesperson during the Gezi protests, kept referring to OTPOR — the small, insignificant and defunct Serbian activist organization that received USAID funding in the 1990s — as supposedly the power behind all global protests, including Gezi.

I suspect there will be no more grasping at straws after ZunZeneo. Secretly funded by the U.S. government? Check. Aimed for regime change? Check. Collected information from unsuspecting users for political purposes? Check. Tried clumsily to hide its tracks? Check. The “Cuban Twitter” was a dictator’s fever dream made real.

Unfortunately, what might have been a well-meaning attempt to bring some free speech to the Castros’ Cuba now threatens the efforts of millions of people around the world who are harnessing the power of social media to challenge censorship and propaganda, and have no connection to the U.S. government. Admittedly, most authoritarian governments hardly needed an excuse to taint social media as a tool of foreign powers. They’ve being doing it for years. But for their core supporters, their rantings about American plots behind every tweet just got a lot more credible.