Yahoo Finance Facebook faces 'log out' boycott on Tuesday over black voter suppression
Facebook is facing a boycott on Tuesday after a report showed it failed to stop black voter suppression.
US civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said it was launching a “digital protest” on Tuesday because of “the tech company’s history of data hacks which unfairly target its users of color”.
It has launched a campaign to encourage supporters to log out of Facebook and Instagram, which is part of the same company, for a week, and called on Congress to investigate Facebook more closely.
It also said it had returned a donation recently received from the company.
A report compiled for the US Senate intelligence committee found that black voters had been discouraged from going to the polls by social media campaigns which spread material designed to persuade them to abstain from the vote and promote disillusionment with the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
St Petersburg-based company the Internet Research Agency targeted adverts on Facebook and Instagram at users who had shown interest in Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, and created websites designed to attract the interest of African Americans, with URLs such as blacktivist.info.
NAACP has returned a monetary donation we recently received from Facebook, and we are calling on supporters to log out of Facebook and Instagram on Tuesday, December 18. We implore you, our partners, friends, and supporters to join us. #LogOutFacebookpic.twitter.com/tOBKhnbRTW
— NAACP (@NAACP) December 17, 2018
Its campaigns were designed to exploit existing grievances among black Americans about issues such as police brutality.
Fake accounts designed to look like they belonged to Americans were created on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr, as well as many other social networks.
The report, compiled by the Computational Propaganda Project, based at Oxford University, and social media analysts Graphika, was one of two compiled for the committee which became public on Monday.
The other, by US cybersecurity company New Knowledge and Columbia University, concluded that Instagram was a “significant front” in the campaign, with more Russian engagements with users than on either Facebook or Twitter.
In February the US Department of Justice criminally charged 13 Russians and three companies, including the Internet Research Agency, with interfering in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
The NAACP also referenced Facebook’s recent admission that it worked with a controversial opposition research firm to look into Jewish billionaire George Soros, saying the revelations “call into question the notion that Facebook operates with a non-partisan view”.
Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the NAACP, said: “Facebook’s engagement with partisan firms, its targeting of political opponents, the spread of misinformation and the utilization of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible.”
