Building a Browser-Based Contextual Awareness Tool for a Politically Sponsored Information Ecosystem

Because of the sociotechnical conditions of cyberspace, users consume information in online environments where the content appears detached from its broader, genetic institutional and political context. This is: news articles, social media posts, and online platforms often appear as isolated pieces of information, with the structures, actors, and funding systems sustaining them remaining largely invisible to ordinary users. In the Cuban context, this issue is particularly relevant. Multiple digital platforms targeting Cuban audiences operate through U.S. government-funded projects to produce specific political outcomes. But that relationship is usually opaque; it is not assertively declared. Thus, users dealing with their contents do so without being aware of the institutional architecture behind them.

A browser extension is a documented approach to tackle this problem. Following that line, I created a pilot project with a simple idea: Cuban and other Cuba-focused users should have access to contextual information while browsing, allowing them to make more informed judgments about the information ecosystems they interact with. The goal here is not censorship, content blocking, or automated truth arbitration. The extension does not attempt to decide what users should believe. Instead, it introduces a contextual layer directly into the browsing experience, informing them when they visit a resource associated with specific institutional and political structures —National Endowment for Democracy, the defunct USAID, or the State´s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. This can be understood as a sociotechnical intervention. Rather than assuming users are passive recipients of information, I prefer to strengthen agency by creating technical mechanisms that support informational awareness and resilience.

Design principles

Several principles guided the development process:

• Real-time contextual signaling

• User autonomy

• Transparency

• Minimal computational overhead

• Browser-level deployment

• Extensible source intelligence

The extension analyzes the current page's URL and searches for it in a local database of identified entities. Initially, this process relied on straightforward hostname matching:

const flaggedEntry = db.domains.find(item => {

    return currentDomain === item.domain ||

           currentDomain.endsWith("." + item.domain);

});

But this works correctly in ordinary situations, like

https://example.org
https://www.example.org
https://sub.example.org

However, an important technical challenge emerged during development, based on my analysis of current tendencies. Digital platforms increasingly use mirrors, proxy services, and cloud infrastructures to distribute content. In these cases, the hosting infrastructure may differ from the identity of the information source itself. For example:

https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/qurium/cubanet.org/article

The browser recognizes:

s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com

as the hostname, while the relevant source identity appears elsewhere:

/qurium/cubanet.org/

Traditional hostname matching, therefore, becomes insufficient in these cases.

Structural URL intelligence

To address this issue, instead of asking only where content is hosted, I tried this

for(const item of db.entries){

    const domains = Array.isArray(item.value)

        ? item.value

        : [item.value];

    for(const domainRaw of domains){

        const domain = domainRaw.toLowerCase();

        if(

            hostname===domain ||

            hostname.endsWith("." + domain)

        ){

            return item;

        }

        if(

            pathname.includes(domain)

        ){

            return item;

        }

    }

}

This allows the extension to recognize conventional domains together with mirrors and proxy structures:

https://cubanet.org
https://www.cubanet.org
https://s3.amazonaws.com/qurium/cubanet.org
https://proxy.example.org/cubanet.org/news

Final thoughts

I think the challenge of informational resilience increasingly starts with something simpler than just evaluating the content itself. It first requires being aware of—and understanding—the structures, institutional actors, and political relationships that enable that content to exist and circulate. Sociotechnical systems can provide users with this critical context to exercise that judgment more consciously. In my case, all based on sound, hard evidence obtained through this approach.