The report, “State of Black America,” was released by the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in New York. It underlined the Russian interference in particular but said black voting rights were under attack from a wide range of actors, including domestic politicians.
In about two dozen states, voting restrictions have gotten worse since 2010 because of changes including new voter identification laws and decisions to limit locations where voters can cast ballots, the report said.
The report’s findings on the Russian interference drew from academic research and federal investigations to highlight the campaign run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, which deployed thousands of accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
One such account on Twitter, called @WokeLuisa, garnered more than 50,000 followers, and its posts were highlighted by dozens of news outlets, the report said.
The account sought to explicitly and implicitly discourage black voters from going to the polls in an effort to secure Republican victory, even as other Russian-backed efforts bolstered white extremism online, said Marc H. Morial, president of the National Urban League.
The FBI has warned that the threat of Russian interference in U.S. elections persists. Intelligence officials have said Russia interfered throughout the midterm elections last year, and that those efforts are likely to intensify during the next presidential campaign.
Bret Schafer, social media analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, wrote about the Russian interference in the report and described @WokeLuisa as one of many fake accounts that impersonated African-American people to exploit pre-existing animosity and discourage voting.
Citing data compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, the report said that as of March, more than 40 states had passed or were considering bills expanding access to voting.
But domestic restrictions on voting, the vast majority of which are imposed by Republicans, proliferated in many states, the report found.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.