Facebook, Russian oligarch influenced Charleston church shooter, widow claims in new lawsuit

The widow of a South Carolina state senator killed in a 2015 racist mass shooting is suing Facebook’s parent company and a Russian oligarch for allegedly promoting white supremacist propaganda online, saying it helped lead to the murders of nine Black churchgoers.

Jennifer Pinckney, widow of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney who served in the state Senate from 2001 until his death in 2015, filed the lawsuit in federal court Wednesday. Jennifer Pinckney and their youngest daughter, Malana, survived the massacre by hiding underneath her husband’s desk at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

The federal government last year agreed to an $88 million settlement with survivors of the Mother Emanuel AME shooting and families of the nine victims for the FBI’s negligence when completing a background check on the convicted shooter, Dylann Roof.

The new federal lawsuit says Meta’s social media platforms are “defective and inherently dangerous” because it allowed white supremacist propaganda to be shared.

Roof, who was sentenced to death in 2017, was young and impressionable by “online engagement with the kind of white supremacist propaganda and ideology that leads to offline violence, including the white replacement theory,” the lawsuit said. “Roof ultimately concluded that he needed to trigger a racially motivated civil war.”

Roof, who was 21 at the time of the murders, had posted photos online showing him with a Confederate flag and a gun, as well as a manifesto where he decried Black people.

The suit says Meta failed to provide adequate warnings to adolescent and young adult users of the danger of online radicalization and offline violence that could come from using the company’s social media platforms.

“Defendants knew or, in the exercise of ordinary care, should have known that their social media products were harmful and causing online radicalization in a significant percentage of their adolescent and young adult users,” the lawsuit said.

Meta did not immediately respond to The State newspaper’s request for comment.

The suit also claims that Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, the Russian Internet Research Agency and the Concord Management and Consulting, a Russian entity, used Meta’s products with malicious intent to influence individuals of racial narratives and misinformation to sow division among the racial and ethnic groups.

The suit calls the Russian efforts a “clandestine operation to incite racial hate and racial violence in the United States.”

“The repercussions of this attack on the social fabric of the United States were dramatic and have caused unimaginable pain and suffering,” the lawsuit said. “The ability to influence the minds of hundreds of millions of American citizens through social media platforms was an opportunity that was not available historically.”

Pinckney is being represented by state Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, Spartanburg attorney Ryan Langley and Alabama-based attorneys François M. Blaudeau, Evan T. Rosemore and Marc J. Mandich.