On November 3, In 2021, Meareg Amare, a chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, was shot dead outside his home. Amare, an ethnic Tigrayan, was targeted in a series of Facebook posts last month alleging that he had stolen the device from the university, sold it, and used the proceeds to buy assets. produce. In the comments, people called for his death. Amare’s son, researcher Abrham Amare, called on Facebook to remove the posts but received no reply for weeks. Eight days after his father was murdered, Abrham received a response from Facebook: One of the posts aimed at his father, shared by a page with more than 50,000 followers, has been deleted.
“I believe Facebook is personally responsible for my father’s death,” he said.
Today, Abrham, as well as fellow researchers and Amnesty International legal counsel Fisseha Tekle, filed a lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, alleging that the company allowed hate speech. spread across the platform, causing widespread violence. The lawsuit calls for the company to remove hateful content from the platform’s algorithm and add staff to moderate its content.
“Facebook is no longer allowed to prioritize profits at the expense of our community. Like radio in Rwanda, Facebook has fanned the flames of war in Ethiopia,” said Rosa Curling, director of fox gloves, a UK-based non-profit dedicated to addressing human rights abuses by global tech giants. The organization is supporting the petition. “The company has obvious tools in place—tuning their algorithms to reduce viral hate, hiring more local employees and making sure they get paid well, and their jobs are safe and fair—to prevent that from happening.”
Since 2020, Ethiopia has been embroiled in civil war. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded to attacks on federal military bases by sending troops to Tigray, an area in the north of the country bordering neighboring Eritrea. an april report published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found substantial evidence of crimes against humanity and a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the ethnic Tigrayan population by Ethiopian government forces.
Fisseha Tekle, Amnesty International’s lead Ethiopian researcher, further pointed to Facebook in spreading abusive content that, according to the petition, endangers his family’s lives. As of 2021, Amnesty and Tekle have received widespread criticism from supporters of Ethiopia’s Tigray campaign—apparently for failing to place outright blame for the wartime atrocities committed by the rebels. Tigraya separatists. In fact, Tekle’s research into countless crimes against humanity in the context of conflict has pointed to belligerents on all sides, finding the separatists and the Ethiopian federal government to be jointly responsible. responsible for the systematic murder and rape of civilians. “There is no innocent party that has not violated human rights in this conflict,” Tekle told reporters during an October press conference.
In a statement Foxglove shared with WIRED, Tekle spoke of witnessing “first-hand” Facebook’s alleged role in overshadowing research aimed at shedding light on government-financed massacres. support, describes social media platforms that perpetuate hate and misinformation as corrosive to the work of human rights defenders.
Facebook, used by more than 6,000,000 won people in Ethiopia, has been an important avenue through which stories of targeting and dehumanizing the Tigray people have spread. In July 2021 Facebook parcel Still on the platform, Prime Minister Ahmed called the Tigrayan rebels a “weed” that needed to be uprooted. However, the Facebook papers revealed that the company lacks the ability to moderate content appropriately in most countries more than 45 languages.
