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The widow of a state senator killed in the Immanuel AME Church shooting is suing Facebook’s parent company Meta, accusing the social media company of intentionally promoting the racist ideology that inspired Dylann Roof to kill nine black churchgoers in 2015.
A federal complaint filed Nov. 3 alleges that Facebook enabled Russian opponents to foment civil unrest in the United States through racist propaganda spread by the website’s algorithm. The complaint names Russian companies and a Russian nationalist as defendants.
Jennifer Pinckney filed the lawsuit on her daughter’s behalf in US District Court in Charleston, South Carolina. The late state senator and senior pastor of Emanuel AME Church, a 200-year-old black church in downtown Charleston, Rev. She is the widow of Clementa Pinckney.
Jennifer Pinckney hugs her daughters Eliana (left) and Malana during the unveiling of a portrait of the late Sen. Clementa Pinckney in the SC Senate in 2016. In the shooting at Emanuel AME Church, Sen. Office. File/Staff
On June 17, 2015, when Dylann Roof pulled out a pistol and fired 77 shots at 12 black worshipers, killing nine of them, the Rev. Pinckney led the Bible study. Next door, Jennifer Pinckney and her daughter hid under a desk in the reverend’s office.
A pale 21-year-old man with a bowl haircut enthroned Confederate history and was inspired by the “white replacement theory,” a racial conspiracy theory that an outside group was trying to destroy whites and their way of life.
Weeks before the attack, Roof changed his Facebook profile picture to a photo of himself wearing a jacket emblazoned with neo-Nazi designs and holding the flag of apartheid South Africa. On his website, Roof left a 2,444-word manifesto detailing his racial grievances that prompted him to target a historically black church in Charleston. He admitted after the shooting that he wanted to start a race war.
The Columbian was convicted of state and federal crimes and sentenced to death.
Roof pulled the trigger, but hostile foreign actors and the Meta provided ammunition, prompting the young adult, the complaint alleges.
Sophisticated foreign actors interested in sowing discord in US society exploited “flawed algorithms” and Facebook’s “profit-before-security” strategy to spread hate propaganda.
“Their weapon of choice was social media infiltration and exploitation, and their strategy was highly successful due to a social media industry led by META that completely disregarded the health and safety of users,” the complaint said. “META exposed those users to a flawed product that caused psychological injury and significantly increased the risk of online radicalization and resulting offline violence.”
“Roof’s online radicalization led directly to untold offline violence,” the complaint alleges.
The complaint alleges that the Russian Internet Research Agency, Concorde Management and Consulting, and Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigogine, disguised as fictional Americans, devised a scheme to foment racial hatred in the US.
According to the complaint, Prigogine runs the Russian Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based Russian Internet research agency that targets southern states, including SC. He is also the founder of Concorde Management and Consulting. Concorde Catering’s parent company Restaurant Group is also named in the suit.
The suit alleges product liability, negligence and civil conspiracy in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which prohibits individuals and corporations from conspiring to deny equal protection of the law.
The complaint marks the latest criticism of Mark Zuckerberg’s media empire and adds to legal challenges to tech companies’ sweeping protections under Section 230 of the US Code.
The Communications Decency Act, also known as Section 230, generally protects website platforms from prosecution in connection with content published by users on its site. But Section 230 doesn’t protect Facebook when liability arises from “defects in the defendants’ own product” — not third-party content, the complaint says.
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