Facebook, Twitter draw fire over pair of Senate reports

They detail Russian social media push to affect ’16 election.

WASHINGTON — Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday were under attack from an array of critics from the president to civil rights leaders, triggered by revelations from two reports on the long Russian social media campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

The segmented messaging and disinformation targeted African-Americans in particular, according to the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee, prompting the NAACP to urge Americans to abandon the social network. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company needs to do more to advance civil rights.

President Donald Trump asserted, without evidence, that social media giants favor his political opponents by rigging their platforms against him. In a tweet Tuesday, Trump slammed Facebook and Twitter, along with Google, claiming they “made it much for difficult for people to join” him.

The reports for the Senate stated that Russian interference had “clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump.”

The reports dovetailed with other strains of criticism — including privacy breaches, human rights abuses and a deflection of corporate responsibility — in what experts said marks a critical point in the public backlash against the global social networks. They capped a tumultuous year for social media companies that appear to lurch from one scandal to the next.

“It’s no longer a drip, drip, drip,” said Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of media and journalism. “It’s no longer these oneoff stories, it’s a fire hose, it’s a river that has really exposed the underlying vulnerabilities of democracies in particular to these disinformation and misinformation campaigns.”

The reports prepared for the Senate showed that Russian operatives vied to manipulate particular segments of the electorate, including a focus on lowering black voter turnout, a finding Sandberg said the company takes “incredibly seriously,” according to a Facebook post. She said Facebook will work to “strengthen and advance civil rights on our service,” adding that “we know that we need to do more.”

In the wake of the reports, the NAACP announced it had returned a donation from Facebook and kicked off a weeklong protest Tuesday, called #LogOutFacebook, encouraging people to abandon Facebook, as well as its other platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, to protest the company’s behavior.

“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,” the NAACP wrote on its website.

Twitter’s drama continued when it revealed Monday that a November security error exposed user data to Internet addresses in China and Saudi Arabia that “may have ties to state-sponsored actors” that may try to access accounts.