on November 3 In 2021, Meareg Amare, a chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, was shot outside his home. Amare, who was ethnically Tigrayan, had been the target of a series of Facebook posts the previous month, claiming he stole equipment from the university, sold it and used the proceeds to buy real estate. In the comments, people clamored for his death. Amare’s son, researcher Abrham Amare, appealed to Facebook to have the posts removed, but heard nothing for weeks. Eight days after his father’s murder, Abraham received a response from Facebook: One of the posts targeting his father, shared by a page with more than 50,000 followers, had been removed.
“I hold Facebook personally responsible for my father’s murder,” he says.
Today, Abrham, as well as fellow investigators and Amnesty International legal adviser Fisseha Tekle, filed a lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, alleging that the company allowed hate speech to run rampant on the platform and sparked widespread violence. The lawsuit calls for the company to deprioritize hateful content in the platform’s algorithm and add it to its content moderation staff.
“Facebook should no longer prioritize profit at the expense of our communities. Like radio in Rwanda, Facebook has fanned the fires of war in Ethiopia,” said Rosa Curling, director of Foxglove, a British non-profit organization that tackles human rights abuses by global technology giants. The organization supports the petition. “The company has clear tools in place – adjust their algorithms to reduce viral hate, hire more local staff and make sure they are well paid, and their work is safe and fair – to prevent this from continuing.”
Since 2020, Ethiopia has been embroiled in a civil war. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded to attacks on federal military bases by sending troops to Tigray, a region in the north of the country bordering neighboring Eritrea. An April report released by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found substantial evidence of crimes against humanity and a campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tigrayans by Ethiopian government forces.
Fisseha Tekle, Amnesty International’s lead Ethiopian researcher, has further implicated Facebook in spreading offensive content, which the petition said endangered his family’s life. Since 2021, Amnesty and Tekle have been widely rebuked by supporters of the Tigray campaign in Ethiopia, apparently for not placing the blame for the wartime atrocities directly on the Tigray separatists. In fact, Tekle’s investigation into the myriad crimes against humanity amid the conflict has goaded belligerents on all sides, finding that the separatists and the Ethiopian federal government were mutually guilty of systematic murders and rapes of civilians. Tekle told reporters at a press conference in October, “There is no innocent party that has not committed human rights violations in this conflict.”
In a statement Foxglove shared with WIRED, Tekle spoke of witnessing “firsthand” Facebook’s alleged role in tainting investigations aimed at shedding light on government-sponsored massacres, and described social media platforms perpetuating hatred and disinformation as undermining the work of human rights defenders.
Facebook, used by more than 6 million people in Ethiopia, has been a major avenue through which stories about and dehumanizing Tigrayans have spread. In a July 2021 Facebook post that remains on the platform, Prime Minister Ahmed referred to Tigrayan rebels as “weeds” to be pulled. However, the Facebook Papers revealed that the company lacked the capacity to properly moderate content in most of the country’s more than 45 languages.
