Ethiopia. Facebook taken to court for facilitating incitement of ethnic hatred during the civil war.
In the era of permanent connection, social platforms play a leading role in information that can be both positive and highly harmful. If on the one hand we are witnessing a democratization of information from below and a greater speed in reporting crimes committed by authoritarian regimes or during conflicts and civil wars; on the other hand we are witnessing the proliferation of fake news, war propaganda, incitement to violence and ethnic hatred. It should also be borne in mind that in Africa the most social networks used by users are Americans: Twitter and Facebook even if the Chinese Tik Tok is catching on.
The administrations of American social networks, in addition to carrying out real acts of personal data piracy using the free service as a decoy, are highly politicized and often respond to American power lobbies, usually controlled by the Democratic Party. Both Twitter and Facebook have deleted the account of former US president Donald Trump and, more recently, limited visibility to accounts of the Russian government, Russian media or pro-Russian users (Putiniani, as they say in Italy), increasing visibility to Ukrainian, government and private accounts.
While Twitter is reversing course, increasing freedom of expression on its platform and repressing accounts that clearly spread hymns to violence and ethnic hatred (the new course was wanted by the new owner Elon Musk who also restored the deleted account by Donald Trump); Facebook, of META, continues in its unilateral selection of who can and who cannot express themselves on its platform. A selection that goes beyond the political requests of the American Democrats to follow the obscure reasoning and sympathies of the undisputed Boss and one of the most “illustrious” Guru of the New American Economy: Mark Elliot Zuckerberg.
In the case of the Ukrainian conflict, Zuckerberg makes no secret of his pro-Ukrainian sympathies up to the point of allowing the horrific propaganda actions of pro-Nazi accounts that praise the massacre of all Russian children in Donbass while being a staunch opponent of anything that smells even from a distance of Russian. The same goes for China, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Iran where Facebook promotes accounts opposed to the governments of these countries, even tolerating the mountain of fake news published to discredit the governments which, coincidentally, the American Democrats do not like.
But it was with the civil war in Ethiopia that Zuckerberg gave his worst, allowing for over 2 years the proliferation of messages of pure ethnic hatred, incitement to genocide, ethnic propaganda and fake news against the majority Oromo ethnic group and the minority ethnic group of Tigray. For actively supporting this horrendous orgy of pure hate, META is now subject to a court case that, if lost, would cost Zuckerberg a whopping $1.6 billion. META and Zuckerberg are accused of failing to remove content harmful and violent to Ethiopia and its citizens.
Two Ethiopian nationals, represented by the law firm Mercy Mutemi Nzili & Sumbi and financially supported by the non-profit tech justice organization Foxglove, have filed a lawsuit against US tech giant META in the Kenya High Court in Nairobi, for failing to prevented the dissemination of harmful content that would have contributed to the killing of an academic.
Meareg Amare (an ethnic Tigrinya), a professor at Bahir Dar University in northern Ethiopia, was hunted down and killed in November 2021, weeks after posts inciting hatred and violence against him spread on Facebook. His son Abraham Meareg and Fisseha Tekle, legal adviser at Amnesty International, filed the lawsuit. Prosecutors say Facebook removed the hate posts just eight days after Professor Meareg was killed, more than three weeks after his family first alerted the company.
According to Amnesty International, which joins six other legal and human rights organizations as interested parties in the case, the lawsuit alleges that META promoted discourse that led to ethnic violence and killings in Ethiopia using an algorithm that prioritizes and recommends hatred and violence against Tigrayan and Oromia ethnicities on Facebook.
The case of Professor Amare has been taken as a symbol but Facebook is considered co-responsible for the deaths of thousands of Ethiopians as it allowed, without any censorship or moderation, groups of Amhara and Eritrean extremists to spread hate messages, incitements to violence, photos and information on designated victims, exaltation of massacres carried out by the Ethiopian federal army, the Eritrean occupation troops and the Amhara paramilitary militias.
At the same time, Facebook tolerated false reports of massacres (never occurred) attributed by the regular army of Tigray or the self-defense militia of the Oromo Liberation Army and attacked the accounts of Tigrinya and Oromo militants who denounced the atrocities of the Eritrean and Ethiopian regimes in Tigray and Oromia.
The main beneficiaries of this online orgy of ethnic hatred were: the federal government of Ethiopian Premier Abiy Ahmed Ali, the Eritrean dictatorial government of Isaias Afwerki, the activists of Amhara Diaspora of the United States, the Eritrean activists linked to the secret services of Asmara and the sympathizers of the Amara militia called FANO responsible for at least 14,000 civilian casualties in Tigray and Oromia.
The ethnic hate campaign on Facebook has also affected Amnesty International consultant Fisseha Tekle, who, due to the hundreds of messages posted on this social platform, is now unable to return to Ethiopia, where he would be easily “terminate”. Facebook did not stop the flow of hateful posts and threats despite the fact that the social administration was fully aware of Tekle’s work to denounce human rights violations in Ethiopia.
“In Ethiopia, people rely on social media for news and information. Due to the hate and misinformation on Facebook, human rights defenders have also become targets of threats and vitriol. I have seen firsthand how the dynamics on Facebook have harmed my human rights work and I hope this case will redress the imbalance,” Tekle explains.
Content moderation has become a particularly thorny issue for META in Ethiopia given the currently frozen civil war between the federal government and its allies and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray, which is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people and left millions homeless. It should be noted that the civil war continues in Oromia and other parts of the country.
In December 2021, META’s supervisory board, charged with making independent decisions about content on Facebook and Instagram, instructed the company to order an independent human rights assessment of Facebook’s and Instagram’s role in exacerbating the risk of ethnic violence in Ethiopia and to assess how well it can moderate content in the country’s languages. But in its recently released third-quarter transparency report, the Oversight Board said that “META has either reported the implementation or described it as work that META already does but has not published information to demonstrate the implementation.”
The crafty Zuckerberg defends himself (as in the case of the Ukrainian-language spot published by neo-Nazis) by making believe that it is difficult to identify hate messages written in the Amharic language. A blatant lie in both situations. If one considers that Google’s instant online translation service translates the Ukrainian and Amharic languages with excellent results, one cannot believe that the artificial intelligence systems that regulate Facebook’s algorithms and are in charge of monitoring content are not equipped with translation systems of these two languages. Strangely, however, they are equipped with translation systems for the languages of the “enemies”: Russian, Tigrinya and Oromo, thus managing to intercept all messages considered “offensive” or “harmful” in order to remove them, temporarily suspend the user or permanently delete the account.
If Tekle and Meareg’s action is successful, the US tech giant — which contracts the services of more than 15,000 content moderators globally — could be forced to make changes to its algorithm in 2023.
This isn’t the first time META has faced significant scrutiny over its content moderation policies in Africa. In February, the Nairobi-based firm’s third-party content moderation contractor Sama AI was accused by former South African employee Daniel Motaung of providing unsafe and unfair working conditions and terminating his employment while attempting to start a union in 2019. Motaung has since initiated legal action against META and the contractor.
In addition to the lawsuit filed by Abraham Meareg and Fisseha Tekle, NGO Foxglove has asked the Nairobi court to order Facebook to make fundamental changes to its operations, to end Facebook’s role as the main online tool for fueling violence and hatred . Among the requests are: backtracking on the deletion of commercials inciting violence, using emergency measures similar to those adopted by Facebook after the January 6, 2021 United States Capitol riots; hire enough content moderators to staff the language markets moderated by the Nairobi hub; create a retribution fund to be evaluated by the court for victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook.
In addition to the “political sympathies” nurtured by dear Zuckerberg and his condescension to satisfy all requests for censorship that reach him from American Democrats, there is another reason (even more horrible and inhumane) which explains the proliferation of pure hate commercials ethnicity and incitement to violence against victims (often civilians) of Donbass, Tigray, Oromia.
These Spots are tolerated by Facebook’s monitoring and moderation system to make the content more viral by attracting an avalanche of likes and replies which increase Zuckerberg’s earnings. This is the revelation made by whistleblower Frances Hauge in Facebook Files never denied by META. The Facebook files also revealed Facebook’s dismal failure to invest in security systems in what Facebook calls the “Rest of the World” — Facebook’s dismissive, neo-colonial term for the combined peoples of Africa, Latin America, and Middle East.
« At Foxglove, we believe we deserve all social media to bring us together, rather than divide us. Facebook lets hate spread because it makes huge amounts of money. Stopping the violence costs money, but would still be only a fraction of its huge profits. Zuckerberg can do much, much more. We know this because he *did* the most with the “break the glass” measures taken overnight in response to the January 6 Capitol attacks. And he manages a lot more moderators for the US. So far, Facebook has not invested in the security systems needed to protect millions of Africans. Now, we aim to change that » denounces Foxglove.
