Facebook removes pages linked to Roger Stone and
Jair Bolsonaro in separate moves
Company says fake accounts promoted Trump ally’s books
while material tied to Bolsonaro spread divisive messages
Roger Stone is due to report to prison next week after
being convicted of witness tampering and lying to Congress.
Guardian
staff and agencies
Published
onWed 8 Jul 2020 23.01 BST
Facebook
has suspended numerous pages linked to the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone
as well as a network of accounts associated with Brazilian president, Jair
Bolsonaro, in separate moves to tackle disinformation and fake accounts on the
platform.
The company
on Tuesday took down 50 personal and professional pages connected to Stone and
his associates, including a prominent supporter of the rightwing Proud Boys
group in Stone’s home state of Florida, saying they 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
Bolsonaro’s family, which it says were used to spread divisive political
messages, as well as two other networks connected to domestic political
operations in Ecuador and Ukraine.
The company
said that despite efforts to disguise who was behind the activity, it had found
links to the staff of two Brazilian lawmakers, as well as the president and his
sons, the congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro and the senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
The
allegations by Facebook add to a burgeoning political crisis in Brazil, where
Bolsonaro’s sons and supporters have been accused of running a coordinated
online campaign to smear the president’s opponents.
Researchers
at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who spent a week
analysing the activity identified by Facebook, said they had found five current
and former political staffers who registered and operated the accounts. Some of
those accounts posed as fake Brazilians and news outlets to spread
“hyper-partisan views” supporting Bolsonaro and attacking his critics, said the
researcher Luiza Bandeira. Their targets included opposition lawmakers, former
ministers and members of Brazil’s supreme court.
More
recently, the accounts amplified Bolsonaro’s claims that the risks of the
coronavirus pandemic are exaggerated. The disease has killed more than 66,000
people in Brazil and Bolsonaro himself tested positive this week.
“We have
known for a long time that when people disagree with Bolsonaro they are
targeted by this machine that uses online disinformation to mock and discredit
them,” said Bandeira.
Nathaniel
Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said there was no evidence
the politicians themselves had operated the accounts. “What we can prove is
that employees of those offices are engaged on our platforms in this type of
behaviour.”
Gleicher
also said that, in the case of Stone, 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. “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.
Mark
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, was briefed on the actions beforehand,
officials said.
The
removals risk further angering Trump and other conservatives who accuse
Facebook of suppressing rightwing 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
investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. He is due to report to
prison next week. He did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
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 investigation 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.
Ben Nimmo,
a disinformation specialist at Graphika, 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.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário