Facebook says it removed 100+ Pages and accounts linked to felon Roger Stone, as well as some linked to Brazil's Bolsonaro, for coordinated inauthentic behavior
The longtime Trump friend and former campaign adviser used fake accounts and other deceptive tactics to manipulate public debate, the company said
Washington Post
Context & Ripple Effects
This takedown extends Facebook's coordinated inauthentic behavior enforcement from the state-backed campaigns it has repeatedly removed — Internet Research Agency accounts, the January 2019 Russia-origin network, and Iran-linked operations — to a domestic political operative: Roger Stone, a convicted felon and longtime Trump adviser, plus Pages linked to Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.
The significance is that the target list now includes named insiders of sitting political movements rather than foreign troll farms, and it foreshadows the pattern Facebook would continue months later when it removed seven Pages with over 2.45 million followers tied to Steve Bannon for voter-fraud misinformation.
First-order effects
Stone and Bolsonaro-linked operators immediately lose the fake-account infrastructure and Page reach they were using to shape public debate, cutting off coordinated amplification channels on Facebook.
Facebook takes on direct reputational and political friction with Trump's orbit, since Stone was described as a former campaign adviser and longtime friend rather than an anonymous network.
Second-order effects
Rival campaigns and allied influencers face pressure to abandon fake-account tactics as enforcement demonstrates Facebook can attribute networks to specific individuals, raising the cost of coordinated deception.
Brazil becomes a second enforcement front for Facebook, forcing Bolsonaro's supporters to rebuild audience on other platforms and drawing Brazilian political attention to platform moderation decisions.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — from Russia and Iran networks to Stone and later Bannon — coordinated inauthentic behavior enforcement stops being a foreign-interference tool and becomes a standing mechanism for policing domestic political figures, entangling platforms more deeply in national politics.
Attribution of influence networks to named individuals strengthens the case for identity-verification approaches to platform participation, pushing toward durable proofs that accounts map to real actors.
The trend: Platform enforcement against coordinated inauthentic behavior is expanding from foreign state-backed networks to named domestic political operatives, making moderation decisions an unavoidable variable in electoral politics.
Facebook also removed 35 Facebook accounts, 14 Pages, 1 Group and 38 Instagram accounts linked to coordinated inauthentic behavior in #Brazil that focused on domestic audiences. #FacebookTakedown https://medium.com/...
Today we're announcing four CIB takedowns. These operations all have links to commercial orgs and individuals associated with political campaigns and political offices that are using CIB to influence public debate in their own countries. https://about.fb.com/...
This is interesting—Facebook found the Stone network of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” thanks to the newly unsealed search warrants. Thanks, news organizations who litigated over this! https://about.fb.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Two of the networks FB took down today were run by professional agencies, continuing the social-media-manipulation-for- hire trend we wrote about earlier this year. The other two networks are attributed to Roger Stone and Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro. https://www.buzzfeednews.…
BREAKING: @Facebook just took down four networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior. Attributions include: - “some of the employees of the offices of (...) Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio Bolsonaro and Jair Bolsonaro”; - “Roger Stone and his associates.” https://about.fb.com/...
Also worth noting that most of this activity was aimed at domestic audiences. Disinfo starts at home, guys. On the U.S. front, here's the Graphika report on the Stone takedown. https://graphika.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Just getting to post about this now. FB found and removed some interesting cases of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Among them, fake accounts on FB and Instagram, and Pages, some of them with links to Proud Boys, promoting Roger Stone between 2015-17. https://about.fb.com/...
And from @DFRLab on the Bolsanaro-related cluster. My initial read is that this is the most important of the four takedowns announced today, at least in local political impact. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook specifically cites Roger Stone's alleged network of troll accounts in 2016—revealed in Mueller search warrants this spring—as a reason it looked into his online presence Previously: https://www.cnn.com/... https://twitter.com/...
You know who was part of the Brooks Brothers riot and associated disinfo back in the day — along with Roger Stone? Joel Kaplan. Yeah, that one, the @Facebook VP of global public policy or whatever his title is now. Matt Schlapp was also one of their little groupies. https://twitt…
What an extraordinary story. Bad luck, Facebook. The company-wide effort to brush the grossly distorted elections of 2016 under the carpet just hit a setback. 3.5 years on, a massive $308k influence operation affiliated with *Roger Stone* is unmasked... https://www.washingtonpost…
HAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAA *snort* BWAAAAHAHAHAAAAA GOODBYE ROGER also enjoy the superseding indictments 😁 Stone operated a troll/bot net that worked with Russian intelligence in 2016. GOODBYE! 🤣 https://twitter.com/...
We've been highlighting for years that politicians around the 🌏 also use coordinated networks of fake accounts to influence domestic & local issues. Today's Facebook takedowns reckons with 4 of these cases. 🆕 Our writeup on the Roger Stone takedown: https://www.graphika.com/... h…
‘these networks originated in Canada and Ecuador, Brazil, Ukraine, and the United States’ to folks who keep underestimated the eastern european disinfo battlefield and its global impact — read this and think again. https://twitter.com/...
Roger Stone denies involvement in alleged Facebook disinformation campaign Also says Facebook's claim his social media accounts are linked to the far-right hate group Proud Boys are “categorically and probably false”!! (think he meant provably...) https://twitter.com/...
On the Brazilian takedown - full attribution “individuals associated with the Social Liberal Party and some of the employees of the offices of Anderson Moraes, Alana Passos, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio Bolsonaro and Jair Bolsonaro” - here's @DFRLab. https://medium.com/...
These include operations in the US, Ukraine, Brazil, and across Latin America. In some of these cases, PR firms conducted the CIB; in others, we saw clear links to the staffers of political offices, former gov employees, or campaign officials themselves.
It is depressing to see that it took more than a year for them to come down, particularly because so many of us were sounding the alarm bell 12+ months ago, but I'm glad that Facebook is honing in on this type of activity. Here's why:
In Ukraine, Facebook removed a bunch of pages run by ad firm Postmen DA. These pages were particularly active during Ukraine's 2019 elections, and were among those that many reporters and researchers, including @ChristopherJM @JonahFisherBBC and yours truly, were monitoring.
Much of the discussion about CIB is focused on foreign interference, which is a serious threat we all need to be concerned with. These takedowns are an important reminder that influence operations are also an increasingly domestic phenomenon.
Facebook identifies and removes four networks engaged in foreign interference & coordinated inauthentic behaviour. One group is linked to Canadian firm Estraterra. The group paid approx $1.38 million (USD) in purchasing ads on Facebook. https://about.fb.com/...
Another one of Trump's criminal friends doing shady stuff: Facebook closes network of accounts and pages affiliated with Roger Stone for manipulation https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
🚨 Facebook removed coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting politically-oriented pages and groups in the US, Ukraine, Brazil, and Ecuador. What's important? They had *their own domestic* audiences in their sights. Some observations to follow. https://about.fb.com/...