MIAMI, United States. — The Cuban Telecommunications Company (ETECSA) added several words to its list of phrases censored by SMS on the occasion of the popular referendum on the Family Code, which is being held this Sunday on the island.
CubaNet was able to verify that the messages containing the phrases “code no” or “I vote no” do not reach their destination, although, despite this, the company does apply charges for sending them.
As a result of the anti-government protests of July 11, 2021 (11J), ETECSA limited SMS to only ten consecutive messages, thus preventing the mass sending of information. The state company also leaked words such as “dictatorship”, “demonstration”, “VPN”, “protest”, “singao” among others widely used among those who oppose the Cuban regime.
In this sense, the strategy of the telecommunications monopoly has been to establish predefined words in the servers in charge of managing the forwarding of messages. Therefore, when any of them appear in the body of an SMS, they do not reach the recipient.
It should be noted that from 11J to date no less than 15 words have been added that cause a message not to reach its destination.
Despite the fact that the SMS service is less and less used on the island due to the rise of social networks such as WhatsApp and Telegram, ETECSA keeps this service under surveillance and controlled because it is an alternative that allows communication to be maintained when the Internet service drops.
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