Facebook takes down accounts and pages of Trump ally
Roger Stone
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[July 09, 2020] By
Joseph Menn and Jack Stubbs
(Reuters) - Facebook Inc <FB.O> on
Wednesday removed 50 personal and professional pages connected to U.S.
President Donald Trump's longtime adviser Roger Stone, who is due to
report to prison next week.
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.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said the
removals were meant to show that artificially inflating engagement for
political impact would be stopped, no matter how well connected the
practitioners.
“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 https://bit.ly/2Z7QSzc. “We expect we’re going to see more
political actors cross this line and use coordinated inauthentic
behavior to try to influence public debate.”
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.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was briefed on the actions beforehand,
officials said.
The removals risk further angering Trump and other conservatives who
accuse Facebook of suppressing right-wing voices. Facebook last month
took down a Trump re-election ad that included a Nazi symbol, and it
pledged to steer users to facts on voting when Trump, or anyone else,
touches on the topic.
Facebook is under pressure from civil rights advocates and allied groups
as well, and hundreds of advertisers have joined a boycott demanding the
company crack down on hateful and divisive messages.
Stone was convicted last year for witness tampering and lying to
Congress as it and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated
Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In a lengthy email, Stone said he did not control fake accounts and that
his accounts had no connection to the Proud Boys.
"I am being censored by Facebook and Twitter because my social media
postings expose the truth regarding the now discredited Mueller
investigation and the Russian Collusion hoax as well as the unfairness
of my trial in 2020 to the extent possible without violating the
protective seal left in place by the court and because I am an outspoken
supporter of President Trump," Stone wrote.
[to top of second column] |
Roger Stone, longtime political ally of U.S. President Donald Trump,
arrives for a status hearing in the criminal case against him
brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at U.S. District Court in
Washington, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Robertsle
In search warrant documents released this April, the FBI said a Stone assistant
told interviewers in 2018 “that he purchased a couple hundred fake Facebook
accounts as part of this work.”
Facebook said its probe was influenced by the April search documents. But the
company said that its unit guarding against coordinated inauthentic behavior had
already been looking into Stone's pages after a referral from a separate
Facebook team monitoring dangerous organizations, which was tracking the Proud
Boys.
Facebook marked the Proud Boys as dangerous and banned their content in 2018.
Members have been charged with violence in multiple instances and recently
clashed with anti-racism protesters.
One of the accounts connected to the Proud Boys was operated by Jacob Engels,
Facebook said. Stone testified last year that Engels could post on Instagram on
his behalf and had access to his phone.
Engels, who writes for far-right sites, told Reuters he is not a member of the
Proud Boys but has "embedded" with them to research the group.
Graphika analyst Ben Nimmo, a disinformation specialist, said the Stone network
had been most active in 2016 and 2017, among other things promoting stories
about the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks as part of the Russian
interference effort.
Many of the accounts were later deleted, and in recent weeks they have mostly
reflected Stone’s quest to receive a pardon from Trump for his crimes, according
to Nimmo.
“The inauthentic accounts were amplifying various Stone assets, like his page,
or advertising one of his books,” Nimmo said.
Stone has been stepping up his efforts to get a pardon from Trump before he
reports to prison, where his family fears the spread of COVID-19. Trump has said
that Stone was treated unfairly, and his attorney general intervened to seek a
lesser sentence, prompting four career prosecutors to resign from the case.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Jack Stubbs in London; Editing by
Greg Mitchell, Edward Tobin and Lisa Shumaker)
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