The actress and comedian was detained after Peachtree City Police got a call about 2:30 a.m. regarding a driver asleep at the wheel on a highway, Assistant Police Chief Matt Myers said in a news release. An officer saw a vehicle matching the caller’s description and stopped Haddish as she pulled into the yard of a residence, Myers said.
Haddish later posted $1,666 bond and was released from the Fayette County Jail, Myers said. He did not release any information about a possible court date.
A spokesman for Haddish did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Haddish was the breakout star of the smash comedy “Girls Trip” and has starred in such movies as “The Kitchen,” “Night School” and “Like A Boss.” She’s also written the New York Times best seller, “The Last Black Unicorn” and hosted the popular television show “Kids Say The Darndest Things.”
Peachtree City is located about 40 miles (63 kilometers) south of Atlanta.
😈 A $1,666 bond? Woow!
💭 Evil Isaias Afewerki’s Useful Idiot Tiffany Haddish Cries after Stuck in Antichrist Turkey | Sign of The Times
Turkmenistan’s president has ordered the extinguishing of the country’s “Gateway to Hell”, a fire that has been burning for decades in a huge desert gas crater.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov wants it put out for environmental and health reasons, as well as part of efforts to increase gas exports.
Mystery surrounds the Darvaza crater’s creation in the Karakum Desert.
Many believe it formed when a Soviet drilling operation went wrong in 1971.
But Canadian explorer George Kourounis examined the crater’s depths in 2013 and discovered that no-one actually knows how it started.
According to local Turkmen geologists, the huge crater formed in the 1960s but was only lit in the 1980s.
The crater is one of Turkmenistan’s most popular tourist attractions.
“We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people,” the president said in televised remarks.
He instructed officials to “find a solution to extinguish the fire”.
There have been numerous attempts to end the fire, including in 2010 when Mr Berdymukhamedov also ordered experts to find a way to put out the flames.
In 2018, the president officially renamed it the Shining of Karakum.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 8, 2022
🔥 The Erta Ale volcano which is one of the most amazing natural sites on the planet and the world’s oldest active lava lake remains active.
The recent field observation of expedition leader and guide from Volcano Discovery Ethiopia, Enku Mulugaeta, confirmed that the volcano’s south crater went through little morphological changes before the current eruption started.
A part of NE crater wall (1-2 m) collapsed two times – the first time in the evening between 31 December 2021 and 1 January and the second time in the morning of 1 January, 2022.
The south crater, located in the central part of the caldera, is occupied by the lava lake that has undergone some changes. The intense activity of the lake was accompanied by rapid movements of the lava from the north to the south and small lava fountains, about 1 meter tall.
The terraces on the northern side of the crater appear to have been swamped by the lava after which the lava lake level decreased.
the lava lake is occupying the summit crater now and is back after 5 years of inactivity! The estimated depth of the lake is about 35 meters from the rim with a crater diameter of 200 meters. On 31 December, two big collapses have been observed, meaning that the lake got wider.
As to what exactly caused the eruption and whether it fed new flows from its main outlet channel or whether it was an independent batch of lava that burst out from a flank fissure, is not clear yet.
Erta Ale is the site of the largest of only five known lava lakes in the world. Temperatures inside the cauldron are said to reach around 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 °F). The volcano is known locally as “Smoking Mountain” and “Gateway To Hell.”
Erta Ale is said to be one of the very few Actual ‘gateways to hell’ right here on earth.
Hell—a concept we have heard about in almost every culture’s mythology and popularized by the Greeks. A ‘Door to Hell’ is a passage that leads into the underworld, where the creatures of the dead prevail, under the supervision of the God of Hell. Of course, depending on the culture, this so-called God of Hell is known by various names—from Hades to Lucifer.
🔥 Erta Ale was featured in the 2010 movie Clash of The Titans as an entrance to Hell.
🔥 Erta Ale Volcano (Danakil Depression, Ethiopia): Lava Lake Returned to Crater
💭 Visual observations from Seifegebreil Shifferaw confirm that the lava lake is occupying the summit crater now and is back after 5 years of inactivity!
The estimated depth of the lake is about 35 meters from the rim with a crater diameter of 200 meters.
On 31 December, two big collapses have been observed, meaning that the lake got wider.
As to what exactly caused the eruption and whether it fed new flows from its main outlet channel or whether it was an independent batch of lava that burst out from a flank fissure, is not clear yet.
💭 “It’s just horrifying, Tigrayan deportees are being disappeared and detained back home. After suffering sometimes years of awful abuse, (in Saudi Arabia) they are now being persecuted by their own government, denied freedom of movement and any contact with their loved ones.” Nadia Hardman of HRW.
💭 “There are Tigrayans in Saudi Arabia who now fear deportation more than they do imprisonment in Saudi Arabia,”
“Many of our friends who were returned stop answering their phones after a few weeks in Ethiopia. We have no idea where they are, and we fear the worst.”
💭 Saudi Arabia Should Stop Deporting Tigrayan Migrants to Ethiopia
Thousands of ethnic Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia have been detained, abused or forcibly disappeared after arriving back home in Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch said in a new report Wednesday.
The ethnic profiling and mistreatment of returnees detailed by HRW took place as the federal government fought Tigrayan rebels in a grinding year-long war that has cost thousands of lives and pushed many more people into famine.
Tigrayans repatriated from Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have migrated to seek work over the years, were singled out and held in Addis Ababa and elsewhere against their will upon returning, HRW said.
Others were prevented from returning to Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, after being identified at roadside checkpoints or airports and transferred to detention facilities, the report said.
“Ethiopian authorities are persecuting Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia by wrongfully detaining and forcibly disappearing them,” said Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrants rights researcher at HRW.
The rights watchdog interviewed Tigrayans deported from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia between December 2020 and September 2021, during which tens of thousands were repatriated under an agreement between the two countries.
Some of the Tigrayan deportees detained after arriving in Ethiopia reported suffering physical abuse, including beatings with rubber or wooden rods.
Others were accused of colluding with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ran Tigray before the start of the war, and is now considered a terrorist group by Addis Ababa.
Two deportees told HRW they were taken with other men from migrants centres by police and bused to coffee farms, where they were put to work in terrible conditions for no pay and little food.
Many were denied contact with family, and feared their relatives thought they were still in Saudi Arabia.
“The Ethiopian authorities’ detention of thousands of Tigrayan deportees from Saudi Arabia without informing their families of their arrest or whereabouts amounts to enforced disappearance, which also violates international law,” the report said.
In late 2021 the United States and its allies called on Ethiopia to stop unlawfully detaining its citizens on ethnic grounds under a wartime state of emergency declared in November.
Ethiopia’s own state-affiliated rights watchdog estimated that thousands had been caught up in sweeps that appears to target Tigrayans on their ethnicity alone.
💭 Evil Isaias Afewerki’s Useful Idiot Tiffany Haddish Breaks Down Cries After Stuck At Turkey Airport Trying To Make It Home To Dying Aunt
Actress and Comedian Tiffany Haddish has a break down at Turkey Airlines and treated rude as she tried to make it back into the States to see her aunt before she pass. She’s stuck in Turkey until after Christmas.
💭 Tiffany Haddish Praised Eritrea’s Dictator. Then She Doubled Down In DMs With Young Eritrean Americans.
Standing side by side in front of rows of cultivated plants, a man and a woman beam at the camera, in a photo that could come straight from a family holiday album. The woman on the left is instantly recognizable to millions of people: the actor, comedian, and author Tiffany Haddish. The man on the right is less familiar, but behind the warm smile and the friendly arm across Haddish’s shoulder is one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki. Since coming to power 27 years ago he has been accused of ruling in a ruthless and brutal manner, as Eritrea earned the nickname the North Korea of Africa in the process.
The picture was taken in January 2018 when Haddish visited Eritrea, the country of her father’s birth, for the first time.
In May 2019, she returned to become a naturalized citizen, and left behind a copy of her acclaimed autobiography, The Last Black Unicorn, for Isaias. It was signed with the message, “my brother, my president, thank you for doing what you do.” Her visit coincided with Eritrean Independence Day.
For many Eritreans in the ever-growing diaspora, the handwritten message confirmed their worst fears — that Haddish was inadvertently laundering the Eritrean regime’s reputation in the West by appearing to endorse its hardline leader.
In tweets and Instagram comments, Eritreans living outside of the country wrote to Haddish about the thousands of people, including children, imprisoned without trial, the underground prisons, the indefinite national service program likened to slavery by the UN where people are raped and tortured, the 5,000 people who flee the country every month. They begged her to speak out against the regime, not appear to endorse it.
Days after she gained Eritrean citizenship, Haddish responded: She agreed to talk about the situation in Eritrea with a group of young Eritreans mainly from the US in a Twitter DM conversation.
This is where I come into the story: I’m a Swedish Eritrean activist and freelance journalist based mainly in London. At the time the group chat was being set up, I was an undergrad student also working as a journalist alongside my studies. The young Eritreans setting up the group chat knew me from my Eritrean activism, so they asked me to join because they thought I could help convince Haddish to stop appearing to endorse Isaias and the regime.
Prior to the conversation, the young Eritreans shared Haddish on a Google Doc with all the main points they wanted to tell her about the nightmare inside Eritrea for normal people, including news articles and reports by the UN and Human Rights Watch. The young Eritreans looked forward to hearing how Haddish would respond. But what she said left them utterly crestfallen.
“Good morning y’all,” Haddish wrote. “I tried my best to keep my eyes open to chat with y’all but there was so much to read, I fell asleep on y’all sorry about that.”
Haddish doubled down on thanking Isaias: He was, in her view, a veteran soldier, and people should be grateful for veterans. He was building dams to bring electricity to Eritrea. And he had given her honey from his farm, which had made her grandma feel better. The young Eritreans were stunned.
“I hated her response,” said Lidiya, a young Eritrean Canadian in the DM chat who asked that her surname not be used because, like many in the Eritrean diaspora, she fears reprisals against family in Eritrea by the regime as a price for speaking out.
After all, Haddish embracing Eritrean culture was something to be celebrated by the Eritrean community: They cheered when she wore a traditional Eritrean dress on the red carpet at the 2018 Oscars, when Haddish said she was “honoring her fellow Eritreans.”
Many Eritreans living outside of Eritrea were also understanding of how important discovering your roots could be for an individual’s identity, and aware of how this could potentially hinder someone from looking at a situation critically. When Haddish made her first trip to the country in 2018, she did so to bury her father and connect with her extended family, whom she had never met before.
But it was Haddish thanking Isaias on her visit in 2019 that made Eritreans decide to take more proactive action to speak to her about the realities of the regime. Many of the tweets criticizing Haddish used the #IsSheReady4Eritrea hashtag, referencing her signature #SheReady hashtag and She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood comedy special and tour.
“I remember thinking, Thank you for what?Thank you for running all our youths out of the country? Thank you for locking up our brightest minds? Thank you for destroying our country?” said Lidiya, the young Eritrean Canadian.
“We don’t need celebrity visits that will only be good PR for the dictator, we have solutions and have told her about them for months,” said Yodit Araya, an Eritrean American organizer in the Yiakl movement, which means “‘Enough”’ in Tigrinya, one of the national languages of Eritrea.
The group chat was set up on the premise that Haddish was willing to learn about the situation in Eritrea, and during the exchanges she repeatedly asked what could be done to help. “what can we really do as a Group to make things better?” she wrote. “Come on y’all what can we do? I am only one person.”
Then in an interview with the Hollywood Unlocked show last December, Haddish criticized Eritreans for attacking her without taking any action themselves.
“Y’all can keep telling me all this stuff, but what’s the action? How do you fix it? Don’t come at me with all the shenanigans, rararara, but no damn action,” Haddish said. “Get out of here.”
She went on to defend Isaias and the Eritrean authorities once more.
“I get what that president, I get…look…everybody that’s in office over there, that’s into politics, when you do your research, all of them fought in a war, OK, all of them have fought, they are all freedom fighters, they all fought for their freedom. They have watched their friends die in front of them. So I don’t know about you, but if I’m in a war and I feel like, Oh, if I let this happen or let that happen we’ll be back at war, you’re going to do whatever it takes to defend and protect your land,” Haddish said.
“They were trying to rape that land,” she continued, referring to Ethiopia’s actions in the war. “And they messed it up, they raped the people, they killed a lot of people. So of course he’s going to be a little, maybe overly doing things… I don’t agree with everything that they do, I don’t agree with everything that’s done here in America.”
But Araya, the Eritrean American activist, said that to Isaias and his regime, the war with Ethiopia was “just an excuse, and besides, a peace deal was made more than a year ago, so why has he not changed anything?”
She described Haddish’s comments in the Hollywood Unlocked interview as “extremely disrespectful to the backbreaking work of our activists who have been fighting this regime for decades, most of whom still are imprisoned because of their work.”
“As an immigrant, I really looked up to her and admired how she, despite all the hardship she had gone through, managed to succeed. But I was hoping she would use her success to go back and help the underdog. I wouldn’t think she would turn her back on the underdog.”
Araya said Haddish had failed to grasp the impact someone with such a big profile could have, especially at a time when Eritrea is trying to present a new face to the world and avoid internal reforms.
“She is really famous in the US, she has huge influence. Eritrea is the most censored country in the world — the regime owns the narrative and has made the crisis unknown. Her support is not just symbolic. It’s more than just a picture or innocent visits. She is legitimizing him, whitewashing him,” Araya said.
“We are against her, as a superstar with the platform she has, normalizing our dictator.”
This year marks 99 years since the Catastrophe of Smyrna, the modern-day city of Izmir on the Turkish coast of the Aegean Sea, when Greeks were forced to flee the city due to a fire set by Turkish forces.
It was a cataclysmic event of such enormous importance for modern Greek history that it shaped generation upon generation after 1922, adding yet another unforgettable —and unutterably tragic — milestone to Greece’s long history.
Great Fire cause the Catastrophe of Smyrna
A terrifying blaze, called the Great Fire, destroyed much of the city, causing the majority of Greeks in Asia Minor to flee their homes and seek shelter primarily in Greece, but also in other countries.
Historians of the time period, taking countless eye witness and written accounts of the event, have agreed that Turkish mobs set the Greek section of the city on fire.
Together, they constituted the Christian community of the city, which lived peacefully side by side with the Muslim and the Jewish communities for centuries.
However, politics, and the competing interests of the main global powers, alongside the rising tide of nationalism and the outbreak of the First World War, were the factors that determined the fate of Smyrna and its citizens for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.
As part of the Greco-Turkish War, which raged from 1919 to 1922, Greece’s armed forces went to Smyrna on May 15, 1919.
After major military and political errors made by the Greek government, the Turkish army regained control of the city on September 9, 1922.
Christian populations in Asia Minor in dangerous position
The future for the Christian population of Greeks and Armenians was perilous.
After a series of catastrophic events, the majority of them would end up dead as part of the Greek Genocide, which actually began with a series of confrontations in 1914 and would last until 1923.
Eyewitness reports state that the great fire of Smyrna began on September 13, 1922, and lasted for approximately nine full days, until September 22.
The fire’s results were catastrophic — the entire Greek and Armenian quarters of the city were completely wiped off the map.
Churches, ornate villas, and mansions of great architectural importance, as well as schools and entire market areas, were gone forever, without a trace.
Catastrophe of Smyrna has lasting impact
Official data about the number of the victims of the Smyrna Catastrophe and Greek genocide does not exist.
Experts believe that the number of victims lands somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000, while the number of refugees who were forced to leave Asia Minor numbered in the millions.
The city suffered such enormous damage to its infrastructure that much of it literally had to be rebuilt from the ashes.
But the Greek neighborhoods, which had the most beautiful homes, churches and other buildings — the entire 40 hectares of what was once the most elegant part of the city, and then became a hellish inferno — has no buildings whatsoever on it.
Today the area is an enormous park, known as Kültürpark in Turkish, which serves as Turkey’s largest open-air exhibition center.
There are no reminders there of the glory which once was Smyrna.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 18, 2021
💭 UN approves independent investigation into suspected war crimes in Tigray conflict.
Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised the conflict in Tigray would be resolved quickly.
However, 13 months later, the fighting has intensified amid multiple reports of torture, rape and other atrocities taking place in Tigray.
The conflict has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The UN’s Human Rights Council has voted to set up an independent investigation into war crimes.
Ethiopia’s government says it will not cooperate with investigators and has accused the council of being used as “an instrument of political pressure”.
Why are international efforts to stop the war failing?
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 18, 2021
Proliferation of hate speech on social media has the capacity to cause real-world harm amidst an increasingly violent civil war.
Disclaimer: this article contains examples of hate speech.
In response to a recent proliferation of hate speech on social media platforms, Twitter announced on November 5, 2021 that it had disabled its trends list for Ethiopia to “reduce the risks of coordination that could incite violence or cause harm.” Facebook, meanwhile, published an update of its security protocols for protecting people in-country and curbing the spread of hate speech on November 9. This came in the wake of Facebook removing a post by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for violating the platform’s policies against inciting violence. The post called on citizens to take up arms and “organise and march through [any] legal manner with every weapon and power… to prevent, reverse and bury the terrorist TPLF.”
According to Facebook’s current policies regarding violence and incitement, the platform removes content containing language that “incites or facilitates serious violence.” Additionally, users are not permitted to post “threats that could lead to death (and other forms of high-severity violence) targeting people or places.” This includes “aspirational or conditional statements to commit high-severity violence.”
Despite these policies, Facebook has received repeated criticism for failing to take down violent posts in local Ethiopian languages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, as noted in Washington Post coverage of internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Information from the leaked document suggested that Facebook teams had flagged a network of accounts promoting disinformation about the conflict and inciting people to take up arms. The network was linked with the Amhara militia Fano group, which has been accused of human rights abuses during the current conflict.
Facebook ultimately de-platformed Fano-linked assets in early December for violating its Violent Non-State Actor (VNSA) policy. According to a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company:
The designation of any organization as a VNSA will result in a removal of content that supports or represents the organization or its members as well as the removal of their presence from our family of apps. Under this policy, praise for the group will be allowed except for content that praises violence, which will be considered violating.
Meanwhile, on December 14, the Oversight Board ruled on a post that was automatically flagged by Facebook’s Amharic language systems. The post, which made unverified claims that the TPLF and Tigrayan citizens committed atrocities in an Amhara village, was restored despite being labeled as hate speech by two of the company’s Amharic-language content moderators. The Board ruled that Facebook should remove the post again, saying “rumors alleging that an ethnic group is complicit in mass atrocities, as found in this post, are dangerous and significantly increase the risk of imminent violence.” According to the ruling, the user who created the post did not “even provide circumstantial evidence to support his allegations.”
This is not the first time Facebook in particular has come under fire for allowing hate speech to fester; in 2020, a dedicated disinformation campaign was used to vilify prominent Ethiopian musician Hachalu Hundessa, who was later assassinated. Following his death, rampant hate speech and incitement to violence sparked mobs that led to hundreds of deaths. Since then, Facebook has released community standards guidelines in both Oromo and Amharic.
The DFRLab identified 27 examples of possible hate speech and incitement to violence and shared them with Facebook. After an internal assessment, Facebook removed 15 of them for violating policies on inciting violence. According to a statement released to the DFRLab by Meta:
A number of the posts that were flagged by DFRLab and included as examples in the article had already been actioned, and removed by Meta over the last few months. We have taken additional steps and will continue to leverage our proactive tools to find any duplicates of violating content which we will remove. Of the separate 27 pieces of content shared by DFRLab and reviewed by Meta, 15 were actioned and deleted for Violence & Incitement violations. The remaining 12 were found to be non violating as some were shared in condemnation or in an awareness raising context, whilst others either targeted institutions and/or had no obvious threat. Our Community Standards make clear what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook, and as soon as we become aware of violating content, we will remove it.
Additionally, Meta noted some of the actions it has recently taken in response to the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia and in the lead-up to the general election last June. These include expanding its capacity to review content in Amharic, Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya; developing technology to automatically identify hate speech and ethnic slurs, resulting in more than 92,000 pieces of content being taken down between May and October 2021; removing coordinated inauthentic behavior in Ethiopia; releasing political transparency tools; and running a media literacy billboard campaign across 43 locations in Addis Ababa, “the first of its kind for Facebook across Africa.”
Online violence in Ethiopia
In March 2020, Ethiopia enacted the Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation, which gave the government recourse to fine and imprison citizens for comments made on social media. Civil society groups, including Human Rights Watch, criticized the proclamation for its violation of the freedom of speech and its broad-sweeping definition of hate speech. Under the legislation, if the offense of hate speech or disinformation offense has been committed through a social media account having more than 5,000 followers or through a broadcast service or print media, the person responsible for the act could be punished with imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine up to 100,000 birr (approximately USD $2,120).
However, the DFRLab has identified multiple accounts on both Twitter and Facebook with over 5,000 followers that recently posted hate speech without repercussion from the government. Some of these accounts are themselves operated by government employees or are government-aligned organizations. It is unknown whether the lack of prosecution of these accounts is a sign of selective enforcement or a general lack of resources to pursue those in violation.
A post that received severe backlash online was created by pro-government activist Dejene Assefa, whose Facebook account has over 121,000 followers and whose posts regularly receive thousands of likes and hundreds of shares. In late October 2021, Dejene published a Facebook post stating, “the war is with those you grew up with, your neighbor,” and calling on people to act against the “traitors” even if they do not want to do it.
The post was called out by social media users, including by algorithmic bias expert Timnit Gebru, and subsequently removed by Facebook. However, the DFRLab identified an additional ten pages, with a combined following of over 382,000 followers, that had reposted copied version of the text. According to Facebook, the company is working to remove duplicates and prevent further sharing.
Example of tweet demanding that Facebook remove a post by Dejene Assefa. The post was subsequently removed. (Source: sirarwa/archive)
In another post that was shared nearly 1,400 times, Dejene stated there was still time to cut the necks of the “traitors” and sing victory songs on their graves. The post was flagged by the DFRLab and removed by Facebook for inciting violence.
Violent rhetoric has also been documented from TPLF leaders and supporters. On November 12, Getachew Reda, advisor to TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael, tweeted an official press statement from the Tigray regional government on “nefarious foreign actors.” The post referred to Abiy’s government as “parasitic” and “predatory,” language similar to Abiy’s July 2021 claims that the TPLF were a “cancer” and an invasive “weed.” The press release also said, “The Government of Tigray and Tigray Armed Forces are not liable for any harm that foreign citizens knee-deep in Abiy Ahmed’s criminal enterprise suffer as we exercise our legitimate right of self-defense by taking proportional measures to ensure our people’s safety and security.” At the time of writing, the original tweet remained active on the platform.
On Facebook, Getachew, who has almost 174,000 followers, regularly posts updates corresponding to the Tigray defense forces capturing of different cities. These posts often contain demands for opposing forces to give up or face retribution.
Calls to arms
Posts similar to Prime Minister Abiy’s November 2021 call to arms, which Facebook removed for inciting violence, have appeared on the platform. Many of these posts, however, were less overtly violent. While Abiy called for citizens to arm themselves in order to “bury” the TPLF, other prominent users were more subtle in their calls to arms.
On September 15, 2021, Taye Bogale Arega, an historian who has been vocal in his support of the Ethiopian government, called for the TPLF and supporters to be “eradicated.” The following day, he posted two images of himself holding a rifle. While his post on eradicating TPLF supporters has been removed, the images of him posing with a rifle remain on Facebook at the time of publishing. Taye has over 263,000 followers on the platform.
Screencap of photos posted by historian Taye Bogale Arega of himself holding a rifle a day after calling for the “eradication” of the TPLF. (Source: Taye Bogale Arega/archive)
Another profile posted a blurry image of Amhara militants on November 2 asking for supporters from abroad to donate weapons, saying “give us at least one weapon.” The post, which Facebook has now deleted, was created the same day Abiy announced a six-month state of emergency and authorities in Addis Ababa called on citizens to ready themselves to defend the capital by registering their own firearms. The state of emergency requires citizens to carry identification at all times, allows for random raids by security forces, and gives police the ability to detain without a warrant anyone suspected to have connections to the “terrorist group” — i.e., the TPLF.
A post flagged by the DFRLab and deleted by Facebook called for foreign nationals to donate weapons to Amhara fighters. (Source: Facebook)
Following the implementation of the state of emergency, Addis Ababa Mayor Adanech Abiebie congratulated residents of the capital for taking the initiative to patrol the streets. She said the “Junta” would be buried as a result and encouraged citizens to continue acting as police and peace guards.”
Screencap of photos posted by the mayor of Addis Ababa alongside text encouraging citizens to patrol the streets after the implementation of a state of emergency that allows for arrests without warrants. (Source: Adanech Abiebie- አዳነች አቤቤ/archive)
Since the state of emergency was announced, the BBC reported that thousands of Tigrayans in Addis Ababa have been arrested under “suspicion” of supporting the TPLF, raising concerns among human rights groups.
Influence from abroad
The DFRLab also found significant amounts of online hate speech originating in diaspora communities located outside of Ethiopia.
Zehabesha, an influential Minnesota-based broadcasting company with over 1.5 million Facebook followers, posted an image of a devil and the Tigray flag alongside text calling the TPLF derogatory names. The post remained active at the time of publishing. In early November, Zehabesha also published a video interview with a Fano leader that called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps. Facebook removed the videos, though copies of it shared in the context of condemning the remarks remain on the platform.
Tweet referencing concentration camp remarks by a Fano militia leader as hate speech. (Source: TranslateET/archive)
Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT), based in Washington, DC, has also been accused of spreading hate speech against Tigrayans as far back as 2016. In late October, digital rights activist Berhan Taye reported a Facebook post by ESAT broadcaster Mesay Mekonen that also called for all Tigrayans to be placed in concentration camps. Facebook initially told Taye that the content did not violate its community standards policy. The post was eventually taken down, although it had been shared over 6,000 times and the same text has been copy and pasted elsewhere on the platform. (Source: btayeg/archive)
Multiple videos posted by Mekonnen Kebede, a US citizen with 69,000 followers on Facebook, were removed for hate speech and inciting violence after being flagged by the DFRLab. In one video, Mekonnen, who has close links with the Fano militia and has posted photos and videos from the front lines, called for the death of 7 million Tigrayans. Before being removed, the video had received over 182,000 views. Another now-deleted video promoting the removal of the Oromia region from Ethiopia’s map and inciting violence against members of the Oromo ethnic group was viewed more than 91,000 times. A video used to raise funds prior to Mekonnen joining the war effort was also removed, although it is unknown whether the requested funds were directed specifically to the Fano militia.
On November 2, the verified Twitter account for Kenyan writer Dikembe Disembe, which has over 330,000 followers, tweeted in English, “Ethiopia must annihilate Tigray just like Rwanda humbled the Hutus.” The post was reported and quickly removed, to which Disembe tweeted the response, “TPLF bots. TPLF is a terror group Ethiopia must rid.”
According to the BBC, posts written in local languages other than Amharic, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, “are less vulnerable to being reported and blocked.” This has allowed social media users across the board to demonize war refugees and call for genocide against ethnic minorities. Although recent media attention has focused on Amharic content, violent rhetoric has persisted on social media since the war broke out in 2020, and continues to spread across multiple platforms.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 