Women’s Groups to Defend Kamala Harris against Sexist Attacks

Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and Republican, said Biden's running mate will be at the center of an “ugly” social media campaign from online bullies.

“This is going to be brutal because these platforms allow people to do things anonymously, saying things anonymously,” Whitman said.

If elected, Harris would be the country’s first Black vice president. That has invited not only sexist but racist commentary and misinformation around her candidacy.

Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, has been the victim of online falsehoods for more than a year that say she is not eligible to become president because her parents were not born in America.

More recently, Facebook users added a new twist to the misinformation: that since Harris is not eligible to be president, if Biden didn’t finish his term the presidency would automatically default to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

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There is no truth to that — Harris is a natural-born US citizen who’s eligible to be president — yet the misinformation has been shared by thousands of Facebook users. Facebook has labeled the posts as false but has not removed them from its platform.

The misinformation hearkens back to the conspiracy theories in 2008 around Democrat Barack Obama, the first Black US president, that claimed he was born in Kenya, not the United States.

Those claims were amplified by Donald Trump, then a reality TV star, and gained so much traction during the campaign that Obama produced a birth certificate showing he was born in Honolulu.

The latest attacks on Harris’ citizenship were highlighted in a letter from more than 100 lawmakers from around the country and the world sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg calling on them to remove misinformation, and posts or accounts that threaten women.

“Much of the most hateful content directed at women on Facebook is amplified by your algorithms which reward extreme and dangerous points of view with greater reach and visibility,” said the letter, which was spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California.

Cindy Southworth, Facebook’s head of women’s safety, said the company will work with the lawmakers to “surface new solutions.”

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“Abuse of women on the internet is a serious problem, one we tackle in a variety of ways — through technology that identifies and removes potentially abusive content before it happens, by enforcing strict policies, and by talking with experts to ensure we stay ahead of new tactics," she said.

But mere minutes after Harris was announced as Biden's running mate, pro-Trump social media personalities and conservative news outlets claimed Harris called Biden a racist during a televised Democratic debate last year.