Facebook takes down accounts and pages of Trump ally Roger Stone

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc yesterday 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 rightwing 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.