Longtime Donald Trump consigliere Roger Stone is due in prison next week. Facebook on Wednesday took down 50 personal and professional pages connected to the U.S. President’s former adviser, about 10 years after it would do any good.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, wrote on the company blog that the Roger Stone takedowns should send a message that artificially inflating engagement for political use will be stopped.
“It doesn’t matter what they’re saying, and it doesn’t matter who they are,” Gleicher told Reuters before the announcement on the company’s blog.
“We expect we’re going to see more political actors cross this line and use coordinated inauthentic behavior to try to influence public debate.”
Read more at Facebook:
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior
By Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy, July 8, 2020
Joe Menn and Jack Stubbs at Reuters report:
The social media platform said Stone and his associates, including a prominent supporter of the right-wing Proud Boys group in Stone’s home state of Florida, had used fake accounts and followers to promote Stone’s books and posts.
Facebook moved against Stone on the same day it took down accounts tied to employees of the family of Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro and two other networks connected to domestic political operations in Ecuador and Ukraine.
[…]Facebook officials said they took down Stone’s personal Facebook and Instagram pages and his Stone Cold Truth Facebook page, which had 141,000 followers. A total of 54 Facebook accounts and 50 pages were removed for misbehavior, including the creation of fake accounts. The accounts spent more than $300,000 on advertisements over the past few years, Facebook said.
Read More:
Facebook takes down accounts and pages of Trump ally Roger Stone