For years, Facebook has faced allegations that it has failed to prevent the spread of harmful content in Ethiopia, a country wracked by ethnic violence in a divisive civil war. Now, Facebook’s parent company Meta has been hit by a lawsuit containing alleged evidence of deaths “contributed to” by the platform’s amplification of, and failure to remove, hateful posts there.
One of the lawsuit’s two plaintiffs is Abrham Meareg, a Tigrayan man whose father was killed in an attack, that he says was a direct result of ethnically-motivated misinformation shared on the platform.
Meareg’s father, Meareg Amare, was a respected chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, according to his son’s witness statement accompanying the lawsuit, filed in Nairobi, Kenya. As a Tigrayan, Amare was an ethnic minority in the region. In the fall of 2021, as conflict escalated between Amharas and Tigrayans in the Ethiopian civil war, several accounts on Facebook shared Amare’s name and photograph, and posted comments accusing him of being a “snake” and posing a threat to ethnic Amharas. Although his son saw and reported many of the posts to the platform, Facebook declined to remove them, the witness statement alleges.
On Nov. 3, 2021, a group of men followed Amare home from the university and shot him dead outside his home, the lawsuit says. He lay dying in the street for seven hours, the lawsuit adds, with the men warning onlookers that they too would be shot if they gave him medical assistance.
“I hold Facebook responsible for my father’s killing,” Abrham Meareg told TIME. “Facebook causes hate and violence to spread in Ethiopia with zero consequences.”
The other plaintiff in the case is former Amnesty International researcher, Fisseha Tekle, who gathered evidence of Facebook posts that the lawsuit says contributed to real-world killings. His work led to him and his family becoming targets of abuse, the lawsuit says.
Ethiopia has long been a key example cited by critics of Facebook’s role in ethnic violence internationally, along with Myanmar, where Facebook has admitted it did not do enough to prevent what some observers have labeled a genocide. In 2021, documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed that staff at the platform knew it was not doing enough to prevent armed groups in Ethiopia using the platform to spread ethnic hatred. “Current mitigation strategies are not enough,” one of the internal documents said. But the new lawsuit is the first to directly present allegations of Facebook posts leading to deaths there.
The lawsuit demands Meta impose measures to further reduce the spread of hatred and incitement to violence in Ethiopia. The company took similar “break glass” steps during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, when the platform “down-ranked” content that its algorithms determined posed a risk of incitement to violence. The plaintiffs are petitioning the court to force Meta to create a $1.6 billion fund for “victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook.” The lawsuit also proposes that Facebook hire more content moderators with Ethiopian language expertise at its Africa hub in Nairobi, where TIME exposed low pay and alleged workers’ rights violations in an investigation earlier this year.
Lawyers for Tekle and Meareg said they filed the lawsuit in a court in Kenya rather than in Ethiopia, because Nairobi is the base for Facebook’s content moderation operation in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Nairobi has become a Hub for Big Tech,” Mercy Mutemi, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Not investing adequately in the African market has already caused Africans to die from unsafe systems. We know that a better Facebook is possible—because we have seen how preferentially they treat other markets. African Facebook users deserve better. More importantly, Africans deserve to be protected from the havoc caused by underinvesting in protection of human rights.”
Haugen’s disclosures “show Facebook knows that this is a really serious problem, that their software design is promoting viral hate and violent inciting posts,” says Rosa Curling, co-director at the legal nonprofit Foxglove, which is supporting the case. “They are not doing anything to change that, and on the face of it it looks as if that’s being done simply for the benefit of their profits.”
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “We have strict rules that outline what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram. Hate speech and incitement to violence are against these rules, and we invest heavily in teams and technology to help us find and remove this content. Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our safety and integrity work in Ethiopia. We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise and continue to develop our capabilities to catch violating content in the most widely spoken languages in the country, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya.”
Facebook has 21 days to respond to the lawsuit in the Nairobi court.
😈 Soon it’s Anthony John Blinken – the Son of a Holocaust survivor – who will be sued for shaking hands with the Devil, aka black Hitler Abiy Ahmed Ali.
On the afternoon of November 2 last year, Gebremichael Teweldmedhin, a Tigrayan jeweller and father of nine, headed to work in Gonder, a city in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia where he had lived for more than three decades.
When Gebremichael arrived in the city, he found a mob looting his nephew’s workshop. Gebremichael begged them to stop. Instead, they turned on him.
One relative, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told the Bureau: “The looters took them, Gebremichael along with another 10 or 11 people who worked in that area – by vehicle. We tried to follow them but we were not able to get their whereabouts.
“Then other people told us they were killed. They are buried in a mass grave.”
Gebremichael was not political, his relative said. He was not educated, and did not engage with the hatred and misinformation that swamps Ethiopian social media. Yet his relative claimed online hate campaigns and calls for violence – particularly on Facebook – played a key role in not only his killing, but many others.
“The worst thing that contributed to their killing are the so-called activists who have been spreading hate on social media,” he told the Bureau. Some posts, he claimed, would name individuals or even post photos helping create an atmosphere “inciting attacks, killings and displacements”.
Thousands have died and millions more have been displaced since fighting broke out between government forces and armed opposition groups from the country’s Tigray region in November 2020. The government has also been fighting an armed group from the Oromia region, and the UN secretary general António Guterres said last November that “the stability of Ethiopia and the wider region is at stake”.
On November 9, Mercy Ndegwa, Facebook’s public policy director for East Africa, and Mark Smith, its global content management director, used a blog post to offer reassurances that Ethiopia “has been one of our highest priorities” and that their company “will remain in close communication with people on the ground”.
But the Bureau’s investigation has uncovered a litany of failures. The company has known for years that it was helping to directly fuel the growing tensions in the country. Many of those fighting misinformation and hate on the ground – fact checkers, journalists, civil society organisations and human rights activists – say Facebook’s support is still far less than it could and should be.
A senior member of Ethiopia’s media accused Facebook of “just standing by and watching this country fall apart”. Others told the Bureau that they felt requests for assistance had been ignored and that meetings failed to materialise. These failures, they said, were helping to fuel a conflict that has already led to reports of ethnic cleansing and mass rape. Amnesty International has accused both sides in the conflict of carrying out atrocities against civilians.
All the while posts inciting violence or making false claims designed to encourage hate between ethnic groups in Ethiopia have been allowed to circulate freely. The Bureau has identified and spoken with relatives of people allegedly killed in multiple different attacks, but has not been able to cross-check specific details on the ground because of the ongoing violence.
Facebook said it had worked for two years on a comprehensive strategy to keep people in Ethiopia safe on their platforms, including engaging with civil society groups, fact checking organisations, and forming a special policy unit.
Gebremichael’s family cited one Facebook user in particular: Solomon Bogale, an online activist with more than 86,000 followers on Facebook. Though listed on Facebook as living in London, Bogale’s social media indicates that he has been in Ethiopia since August 2021, with posts of him in fatigues and carrying an assault rifle often accompanied by statements praising the Fano, an Amharan nationalist vigilante group.
In the opinion of one of Gebremichael’s family members, Bogale’s “inciteful posts” had resulted in many attacks on Tigrayans in Gonder.
In the weeks before Gebremichael’s killing, Bogale called for people to “cleanse” the Amhara territories of the “junta”, a term often used by government supporters to refer to the Tigrayan forces fighting the government and Tigrayans more generally. The post continued: “We need to cleanse the region of the junta lineage present prior to the war!!”
On October 31, two days before Gebremichael’s disappearance, Bogale posted an image of an elderly woman holding grenades, with the caption: “#Dear people of Amhara, there are mothers like these who are fighting to destroy Amhara and destroy Ethiopia! The main solution to save the #Amhara people and to protect Ethiopia is we Amharas have to rise up!! Get together Amhara.”
The Bureau has verified that both posts remained up on Facebook almost four months later, along with many others from various sources containing hate speech, calls for violence and false claims. Throughout the conflict misinformation and hate have been deployed on Facebook and other social media, inflaming tensions and influencing the outcome of military operations.
Contacted over Facebook, Bogale denied that any Tigrayans were killed in Gonder in early November, saying all Tigrayans in the city were safe. He also claimed that Tigrayan forces had killed ethnic Amharans in the region.
He also said he would delete the posts cited by the Bureau.
Facebook said it had reviewed the posts flagged by the Bureau and had removed any content that violated its policies. The Bureau found one post had been removed. At the time of publication, the post of the woman holding grenades remained online.
Criticism of Facebook’s failings is made more damning by the extensive evidence that the company has known of the risk of such problems for years, according to disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. The redacted versions received by Congress were reviewed by a consortium of news organisations, including the Bureau.
As early as January 2019 an internal report into various countries’ “On-FB Badness” – a measure of harmful content on the platform, including hate and graphic violence – rated the situation in Ethiopia as “severe”, its second-highest category.
By June 2020, Facebook had become even more starkly aware of the problem. An internal document discussing measures used to assess the level of harmful content said it had “found significant gaps in our coverage (especially in Myanmar and Ethiopia)”.
Six months later, Ethiopia had risen to the top of Facebook’s list of countries where it needed to take action. In a presentation circulated on December 10 2020, the risk of societal violence in Ethiopia was ranked as “dire” – Facebook’s highest threat warning. It was the only country to be given that ranking.
More than a year on, the Bureau’s investigation has found that Facebook is said to have frequently ignored requests for support from fact checkers based in the country and some civil society organisations say they have not met with the company in 18 months. The Bureau has learned from multiple sources that Facebook only appointed its first senior policy executive from Ethiopia to work on East Africa in September.
Facebook does run a third-party fact-checking programme, providing partners with access to internal tools and payment for fact checks. As its website states: “We rely on independent fact checkers to review and rate the accuracy of stories through original reporting.” But it has not partnered with a single organisation based in Ethiopia to tackle the misinformation spread by all sides in the country’s conflict.
Abel Wabella, founder of the Ethiopian fact-checking initiative HaqCheck said Facebook had failed to support his organisation since he first approached executives more than a year ago.
“They told me, ‘OK, we can help you, just write to us, our email.’ They gave me their cards. And I wrote to them,” he told the Bureau. But he heard nothing back. “At that time, our initiative was very small, so I thought they didn’t find something good in our platform, so they wanted to keep silent because of that.”
Wabella sent two further emails over the next few months, the second to the new Facebook executive from Ethiopia he had heard had been appointed. Despite assuring him that she would take action in September, he said he had heard nothing from the company since.
Rehobot Ayalew, HaqCheck’s lead fact checker, said the lack of support had severely hampered her team’s work. “Most of the people have low media literacy, so Facebook is considered to be credible … So working with Facebook, and also checking and verifying Facebook content, is the major way to counter this disinformation.” Wabella added: “The problem is not specific to Tigray. Ethiopian citizens from every corner across ethnic groups were severely affected by hateful content circulating online, specifically Facebook.”
The other major independent fact-checking organisation based in Ethiopia, Ethiopia Check, is also not part of Facebook’s partner programme.
Facebook said it had constantly engaged with civil society organisations and human rights groups on the ground, but did not partner with HaqCheck and Ethiopia Check because neither was certified by the International Fact-Checking Network.
Facebook does work with two fact-checking organisations on content from Ethiopia – PesaCheck, which runs a small team in Nairobi, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) – but both of them are based outside the country. We understand that AFP has just one fact checker in the country but in response to our story Facebook told the Bureau that “both PesaCheck and AFP have teams based in Ethiopia for fact-checking”. While misinformation flagged by PesaCheck and AFP has often been labelled as false or removed by Facebook, content investigated and debunked by HaqCheck has largely remained unaltered and free to spread.
This has included false declarations of military victories on both sides, false allegations of attacks on civilians and false claims of captured infiltrators. On November 25 last year, the Ethiopian government banned all unofficial reporting of battles, further enforcing an information vacuum in which misinformation spreads easily.
“As far as I know, support for fact checkers in Ethiopia by Facebook is almost non-existent,” said the senior person working in Ethiopian media, who asked to remain anonymous. “Facebook doesn’t pay the attention Ethiopia needs at this crucial moment, and that’s contributing to the ongoing crisis by inflaming hatred and spreading hate speech.”
A number of civil society groups have similar complaints of feeling ignored and sidelined. Facebook organised a meeting with several groups in June 2020, to discuss how the platform could best regulate content before scheduled elections. As of November, two of the organisations involved said they had heard nothing about any subsequent meetings.
“The recent development has been overwhelming. Facebook should have had a similar consultation,” said Yared Hailemariam, executive director of the Ethiopian Human Right Defenders Center. “Facebook also ought to have a working group, collaborating with human rights organisations and civil society groups.”
Haben Fecadu, a human rights activist who has worked in Ethiopia, said the hate speech issue was flagged to Facebook years ago but the company had still not provided adequate resources to deal with it
“There’s really no excuse and I wish someone had come down harder on them about it,” she said. “I’ve doubted they have invested enough in their Africa content moderation, and doubt that the Africa team has had enough resources to moderate content properly. They don’t have enough moderators … I suspect they didn’t have a Tigrinya-speaking moderator until very recently.”
Facebook’s owner Meta said in January that it would “assess the feasibility” of complying with a recommendation by its independent oversight board that it launch a human rights assessment of its activity in Ethiopia. The recommendation came after the board directed Facebook to remove a post that claimed Tigrayans were involved in atrocities in the Amhara region.
Ayalew, the HaqCheck fact checker, said the inadequate support from one of the world’s richest companies was demoralising. “We usually come across sensitive content, images that are horrifying and hateful content. It’s hard by itself,” she said. “And when you know that, even though you’re trying, you’re not getting the support from the platform itself, that is allowing this kind of content.
“You ask yourself why? Why am I doing this? Because you know that they can do more, and they can change the situation. They have a big role in this, and they’re not doing anything. You’re trying alone.”
Mercy Ndegwa, speaking on behalf of Facebook, said: “For more than two years, we’ve invested in safety and security measures in Ethiopia, adding more staff with local expertise and building our capacity to catch hateful and inflammatory content in the most widely spoken languages, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya. As the situation has escalated, we’ve put additional measures in place and are continuing to monitor activity on our platform, identify issues as they emerge, and quickly remove any content that breaks our rules.”
Just over three weeks after Gebremichael’s murder, Hadush Gebrekirstos, a 45-year-old who lived in Addis Ababa, was arbitrarily detained by police who heard him speaking Tigrinya.
“After they knew he was a Tigrinya speaker, they said, ‘This one is mercenary!’ and took him to a nearby police station … They were beating him hard,” said a relative, who also wished to remain anonymous and who was told what happened by witnesses.
“Two days after – on November 26 – his body was found dead, about 200 to 150m from the police station. They threw his body out there.”
Again, Hadush’s relative said he had no political or social media engagement. Again, he believes that it was lies and hate on Facebook that played a key role in causing the killing.
“It really does. Irrespective of reality, because people do not have the ability to verify what was posted on Facebook. Like calling people to kill Tigrinya speaking residents – as a result of hatred and revenge feelings … You don’t even know who is killing you, who is detaining you and who is looting your property. It’s total lawlessness.”
💥 „A journalist close to the government had called on Facebook to lock people from Tigray in “concentration camps.”
In Ethiopia, the conflict over control of the northern region of Tigray is intensifying. In the capital Addis Ababa, security forces arrested numerous people from Tigray today. A d p a reporter observed how those arrested were taken away in two police vehicles. The reporter saw two vehicles carrying ethic Tigrayans, with some of them shouting “What did we do? We are innocent people.”At the weekend, a journalist close to the government had called on Facebook to lock people from Tigray in “concentration camps”. The message has since been deleted.
In the past few days, the central government, which is currently waging a military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has suffered several defeats. According to information from the rebels, the TPLF is said to have taken control of the city of Kombolcha in the Amhara region yesterday. The military had previously had to withdraw from the neighboring city of Dessie. The capture of the two cities gives the rebels access to one of the main highways into the capital, Addis Ababa.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 6, 2021
For years, Facebook has been serving as one of the main platforms the fascist Oromo regime in Ethiopia & its followers used it incite hate and demonize Tigrayans, resulting in the ongoing 11-month-old #TigrayGenocide.
💭 “What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it” Frances Haugen ends her remarks with a warning that without further action, Facebook will only become more dangerous to the world.
Facebook ‘operates in shadows’ – and Instagram is worse than other social sites, whistleblower tells Congress
“Mark holds a very unique role in the tech industry in that he holds over 55% of all the voting shares for Facebook. There are no similarly powerful companies that are as unilaterally controlled,” said Ms Haugen.
Facebook’s products “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy”, a whistleblower has claimed.
Frances Haugen – who used to work as a product manager at the tech giant – has given damning evidence to US politicians in the Senate, days after leaking internal documents to the Wall Street Journal.
Her testimony also came after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered an unprecedented outage for almost six hours on Monday – leaving its 3.5 billion users struggling to access services.
Ms Haugen warned: “Left alone, Facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good. Our common good.
“When we realised Big Tobacco was hiding the harms, that caused the government to take action. When we figured out cars were safer with seatbelts, the government took action.
“And when our government learned that opioids were taking lives, the government took action.”
Following the hearing Facebook said that Ms Haugen had worked with the company for less than two years and it didn’t “agree with her characterisation of the many issues she testified about”.
The whistleblower implored politicians in the hearing to take similar action against Facebook – and alleged that the company’s leadership knows how to make its platforms safer but won’t make the necessary changes “because they have put their astronomical profits before people”.
She later warned that there was nobody at the company who could hold Mark Zuckerberg accountable other than himself.
“Mark holds a very unique role in the tech industry in that he holds over 55% of all the voting shares for Facebook. There are no similarly powerful companies that are as unilaterally controlled,” she said.
And she added: “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable.”
Addressing Monday’s outage, Ms Haugen said: “For more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilise democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”
Explaining why she drew parallels between Facebook, Instagram and Big Tobacco, she said such platforms give young people “little dopamine hits” every time they receive a like – and many children fear being “ostracised” and disconnected from their peers if they stop using it.
Ms Haugen also said she believes Instagram is “worse” than other apps such as TikTok, Reddit and Snapchat because of how it is “about bodies and comparing lifestyles”.
Facebook has said “a number of inaccurate claims” were made during her testimony.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said Facebook knew that its products were addictive like cigarettes – adding: “Tech now faces that Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth.”
Criticising Zuckerberg, he added: “Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror.”
He also assured Ms Haugen that politicians will do “anything and everything to protect and stop any retaliation against you, and any legal action that the company may bring to bear”.
And in a direct message to Zuckerberg, Senator Ed Markey said: “Your time of invading privacy, promoting toxic content and preying on children and teens is over.”
Vowing that Congress will take action against the company, he added: “You can work with us or not work with us.”
Some senators personally extended an invitation for Zuckerberg to testify in front of the committee and put forward Facebook’s side of the story, while others accused him of going sailing instead of facing his responsibilities.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 17, 2016
My Note: Battle of Vienna: September 11th – 12th, 1683 – it was Ethiopia’s New Year’s Day – in an open battle before Vienna, the Ottoman Turks were defeated, The Chief Commander of the army that rescued Vienna was the Polish King, Jan Sobieski. As Europe’s refugee crisis is escalating from tragedy to farce, could Poland once again save the wicked Europeans? Notice, they will use force in the Mediterranean to block “Black Africans” from reaching Europe, but they will send money and vessels to pick up Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans in the Aegean Sea. It’s obvious that their agenda is to import only Asian Muslims or non-Christian Africans. Number of years between Tuesday, 11 September 1683 (Julian calendar) and Sunday, 11 September 2016 (Gregorian calendar) is equal to exact 333 years. 666 = evil, hence 333 = half evil. Note this coming date!
One of Poland’s most popular weekly magazines has splashed a graphic depiction of the rape of Europe’s women by migrants on its front cover. The image may be one of the most politically incorrect illustrations of the migrant crisis to date.
While Poland is generally much more relaxed about expressing itself than the self censoring tendencies of western and northern Europe, the cover of the latest wSieci (The Network) conservative magazine has already prompted reaction just 24 hours after release, being beamed around the continent by social media.
Featuring a personification of Europa being pawed at by dark hands — what the German media would perhaps euphemistically term “southern” or “Mediterranean” — the headline decries the “Islamic Rape of Europe”.
Making perfectly clear the intention of the edition, the edition features articles titled ‘Does Europe Want to Commit Suicide?’ and ‘The Hell of Europe’. The news-stand blurb declares: “In the new issue of the weekly Network, a report about what the media and Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of the European Union”.
Opening the cover article, Aleksandra Rybinska writes: “The people of old Europe after the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne painfully realised the problems arising from the massive influx of immigrants. The first signs that things were going wrong, however, were there a lot earlier. They were still ignored or were minimised in significance in the name of tolerance and political correctness”.
Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress” — the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”. This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”, as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.
The collapse of the West in the face of this “Islamic rape” was not inevitable though, as Rybinska quoted British historian Arnold Toynbee: “Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder”.
Underlining the element of choice Europe has had in accepting the migrant crisis, the article cites the early signs of extreme violence perpetrated by migrants — in this case on each other. Recalling an asylum centre riot in Germany also reported on by Breitbart London in August where inmates part-demolished their own taxpayer funded homes because of a dispute over the Koran and attacked police officers while screaming “Allahu Akhbar”, Ms. Rybinska also recounted the fates of Christian asylum seekers beaten by their Muslim counterparts.
The article lists dozens of recorded sex attacks from the past few weeks, often visited upon under-age Europeans, but it is not just migrants who come in for criticism from wSieci. The magazine also had strong words for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who it accuses of listening more to the German industrial lobby which it claims campaigns for cheap labour from outside the European Union.
As a feature begging the question ‘Does Europe Want to Commit Suicide’ concludes, “There is concern that European leaders have too late drawn the obvious conclusions, and some of them feel self-loathing”. “Europe is an oasis of prosperity and peace” compared to Africa and the Middle East, it contends, but the arrival of “millions” of cultural Muslims will “shock and undermine Europe”. The blame for this, the article lays firmly at the feet of Mrs. Merkel.
FAZ Caricature Mocks Cologne Sex Victims
On the front page of the February 13, 2016, edition of “The Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung” a caricature of “Greser &Lenz” can be seen there with the headline “Day of the Lovers” context taken from “Valentine’s Day”.
In the caricature, a couple in love on a sofa can be recognized in a heart-shaped golden frame, she is blond and sitting on his lap, he is dark-haired with a black mustache – apparently a bi-national couple, as the names Chantal and Mustafa also imply. This is not especially funny, and could also be understood with a little good will as a lightly ironic play on the “culture of welcome.” However, there is unfortunately a speech bubble tied with the couple with the following content: “We met each other on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and want to get married”!
I am afraid that the caricature duo couldn’t laugh enough over its cynical incidence. And apparently, this “serenity” was apparently shared by the FAZ editors responsible for the textual and visual formation of the front page. Wasn’t anyone who took part in this moral low aware that this bubble text is a slap in the face of all those women who were sexually abused in Cologne and elsewhere on New Year’s Eve night, who were unwillingly groped, offended in their dignity and most basely humiliated? New Year’s Eve in Cologne was no market for nuptials but rather a horror for hundreds of women, whether blonde or brunette.
Man Arrested in Scotland for Facebook Posts About Refugees
The Facebook posts in question, which were not released to the media, allegedly concerned comments about Syrian refugees from Rothersay, on the Scottish Island of Bute, where several refugee families have settled as part of the UK government’s settlement program.
A spokesman from the the Dunoon police station in Argyll said, “I hope that the arrest of this individual sends a clear message that Police Scotland will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 8, 2016
“Please help us!… It is… very hard to live day-to-day as a woman” says 16 year old Bibi Wilhailm, a German girl who has uploaded her personal experiences of Arab and Muslim migrants in a new video that some claim is being censored by Facebook under it’s new “hate speech” guidelines.
The 20 minute video, apparently created by the 16 year old Facebook user Miss Wilhailm, starts with her saying that she is, “so scared everywhere, for example if my family and I go out together, or if I see a movie with my friends. Usually I stay out until 6pm in winter, and it is so scary. It is just very hard to live day-to-day as a woman.”
The girl – who some social media users report has now been banned from Facebook, though others say she has removed herself – then goes on to talk about an incident that happened to her at a local supermarket saying, “I ran all the way home. I was frightened for my life. There’s no other way to describe it.”
She talks about her experiences over summer, when a group of Muslims said that her and her friends were “sluts” for walking outside in t-shirts.
“Yes, we were wearing t-shirts. It’s summer!” She adds: “Another day, I was wearing this. My friend and I purchased it while shopping. If we feel like wearing it, we will wear it! And you Muslims have no right to physically assault or rape us for it! God willing, never in my life. You have no right to attack us because we are wearing t-shirts. You also have no right to rape”.
Miss Wilhailm then turns toward what she sees on social media, describing how she has seen, “a 17 year old attacked, a 15 year old attacked, two 12 year olds attacked, so many,” and questions, “why should we, children, have to grow up in such fear?”
“I cannot understand why they do this. But more importantly, I cannot understand why Germany is doing nothing! Why is Germany standing by, watching, and then doing nothing? Please explain, why. Men of Germany, these people are killing your children, they are killing your women. We need your protection,” she goes on to say adding, “The politicians live alone in their villas, drink their cocktails, and do nothing. They do nothing! I do not know what world they live in, but please, people, please help us! Please, do something!”
Continuing, Miss Wilhailm tells of her own personal experiences with Arab and Muslims migrants saying, “One day, my friend and I were walking down the street, and a group of Arabs were protesting and demonstrating. They shouted, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah is the one God! Kill those infidels! Allah Allah!’ What should I do? Should I wear a burka? Why should I have to convert to Islam?”
“It’s fine if you believe in Allah, but why do you want to make everyone else believe in Allah too? I just think it would be better if there were no religion. Stop trying to make everyone else believe in your God when they do not want to”.
According to the her experiences, the police are no help. She alleges, “they say it is a problem and they ignore it. It is unfair. They laugh at us. They say we are dumb,” and that, “they don’t care about our fears.”
This description matches many other cases where police have been afraid to be labeled as racist for taking a hard line on migrant crime and even victims of migrant crime have been accused of racism for speaking up.
Free market liberal group Freiheitliche Aufklaerung or ‘Liberal Education’ posted the video on their Facebook group page and made the following comment when it disappeared from Miss Wilhailm’s page:
“How many have already noticed the video “You make Germany broken!” is no longer there. In this video, the 16-year-old girl said that she now is afraid to go out alone and that they can not understand the insane asylum policy of the German government. Europe and Germany are thus ruined… Unfortunately, we live in a social dictatorship, in what critics of the establishment and its illiberal policies are tackled and accosted in the strongest terms.”
The group claims it doesn’t have evidence, but says it “can not rule out a censorship by Facebook 100%”.
Breitbart London understands from Facebook that while the matter has not been fully investigated yet, the usual reason for videos disappearing are down to the user taking them down themselves.
The censorship fears come after Facebook announced last year that they would help the German government monitor for “hate speech” and as recently as this month Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has demanded Facebook remove posts and videos in the wake of the Cologne sex attacks. The company insists it does not comment on individual incidents.
The video ends with a stark message for German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “Thank you, Angela Merkel, for killing Germany! I have no more respect for you, Merkel. I do not think you know what you have done. You do not see how our lives have changed. Open your eyes! Is this normal? Should I, a 16-year old who is almost 17, be so scared to walk outside my house? No, it is not normal. You have killed Germany!”
She closes: “men please help your women. Help your children. I am so scared. My friends have the same fears. We are shocked that this has happened. I hope this video can convince you, and that these terrible events can stop.”
Social media users are posting the video to as many video sharing sites and blogs as possible in a bid to keep it online.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 3, 2011
The net isn’t always what we think, thinks the author, Evgeny Morozov, in his book, “The Net Delusion”. Mr. Morozov argues, the west’s reckless promotion of technological tools as pro-democratic agents has provoked authoritarian regimes to crack down on online activity in some style: not just closing down or blocking websites, but using social networks to infiltrate protest groups and track down protesters, seeding their own propaganda online, and generally out-resourcing and out-smarting their beleaguered citizenry.
The following review of the book – in Egyptian context – is taken from the New York Observer
It’s not often that a nonfiction book appears whose thesis is immediately tested by events. But such is the fate of Evgeny Morozov’s “Net Delusion”
Morozov’s argument that the internet does more harm than good in political contexts is running up against violent reality in Egypt.
Morozov takes the ideas of what he calls “cyber-utopians” and shows how reality perverts them in one political situation after another. In Iran, the regime used the internet to crush the internet-driven protests in June 2009. In Russia, neofascists use the internet to organize pogroms. And on and on. Morozov has written hundreds of pages to make the point that technology is amoral and cuts many different ways. Just as radio can bolster democracy or — as in Rwanda — incite genocide, so the internet can help foment a revolution but can also help crush it. This seems obvious, yet it has often been entirely lost as grand claims are made for the internet’s positive, liberating qualities.
And suddenly here are Tunisia and, even more dramatically, Egypt, simultaneously proving and refuting Morozov’s argument. In both cases, social networking allowed truths that had been whispered to be widely broadcast and commented upon. In Tunisia and Egypt — and now across the Arab world — Facebook and Twitter have made people feel less alone in their rage at the governments that stifle their lives. There is nothing more politically emboldening than to feel, all at once, that what you have experienced as personal bitterness is actually an objective condition, a universal affliction in your society that therefore can be universally opposed.
Yet at the same time, the Egyptian government shut off the internet, which is an effective way of using the internet. And according to one Egyptian blogger, misinformation is being spread through Facebook — as it was in Iran — just as real information was shared by anti-government protesters. This is the “dark side of internet freedom” that Morozov is warning against. It is the freedom to wantonly crush the forces of freedom.
All this should not surprise anyone. It seems that, just as with every other type of technology of communication, the internet is not a solution to human conflict but an amplifier for all aspects of a conflict. As you read about pro-government agitators charging into crowds of protesters on horseback and camel, you realize that nothing has changed in our new internet age. The human situation is the same as it always was, except that it is the same in a newer and more intense way. Decades from now, we will no doubt be celebrating a spanking new technology that promises to liberate us from the internet. And the argument joined by Morozov will occur once again.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on August 8, 2009
After we’ve heard the latest rumors that Twitter and Facebook might have been taken down by the Russians, I must say, all in all, these past days had been bad days for social networking.
It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.
His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on March 14, 2009
“And he gives to all, small and great, the poor and those who have wealth, the free and those who are not free, a mark on their right hand or on their brows; So that no man might be able to do trade but he who has the mark, even the name of the beast or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16-17
A couple of days ago I read a story about, Catholic bishops and priests in Italy asking churchgoers to make the ultimate sacrifice – and give up text messages, TV, iPods and Facebook for Lent. What could be their motivation for issuing such a warning?
We should be certain that, anyone who watches a TV is capable of knowing that Satan can come in many forms. He can be disguised as a very tempting sexy woman, a snake, a superhuman who can do whatever he/she wants, a magician who can wield a pitchfork etc.
But who would have guessed that the devious lord of hell would be a Web site? So, could it be “Facebook.”? This “networking” site allegedly offers to help the typical lonely, needy college students find each other. A place online where we can connect and form key bonds and lasting friendships. Or may be not.
Technology is a wonderful thing if we know how to use it properly. But, over the last couple of weeks I’ve reached a profound conclusion, that Satan, as well, is using technology to destroy humanity. One of the fun things about watching technology march by like a parade — one where all the bands get smaller and rounder as time goes on — is seeing new interpretations of the Bible based on the latest advances.
Early last century, the Mark of the Beast was your Social Security card, which presumably was encoded into the Computer Punch Card of the Beast and fed into Satan’s Mainframe.
After that, the Mark of the Beast was your credit card, and in the ’70s the UPC symbol was the new Mark, presumably because of the passage in Revelations stating, “And the mark was placed upon the Wonder Bread, both white and the kind they call wheat, even though it’s basically a slightly more tan version of the white stuff.”
Now, of course, the Mark of the Beast is RFID chips. It’s not enough that they might get your purchases tracked or your identity stolen, they might also get you booked into the Hotel Inferno for all eternity. Soon we will have TV or Movies on our eyes through contact lenses.
I think Bible believers, followers and/or thumpers are really overlooking the other technological warnings inherent in Revelation. Here are some actual Bible verses, and the cutting-edge technology to which they clearly refer:
“And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.”
This is obviously a reference to file sharing. The “stars” in question are the hard-working entertainers of the world, “falling to earth” because of the “casting” of their works to and fro like figs (figs were the main form of entertainment in the ancient world) by a “mighty wind.” A mighty wind? Like a “torrent,” perhaps?
In Revelation 6:15 we read further, “And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.
Clearly the “hiding” is the anonymity provided by “dens” of personal web spaces like Facebook and MySpace. The rocks are friends lists or something… Once the mighty men start joining Facebook, we’re screwed. So, please don’t do it, mighty men!
One that will no doubt rock the foundations of both social life and established religious thought could come through technology. Could the devil be lurking behind Facebook to suck the soul of unconscious and unaware folks?.
Of course, the weak are easy prey to Facebook’s temptations. We all show weakenss one way or the other. I used to check Facebook first. And there goes my afternoon. For many, it is difficult to wrap their mind around the mysterious allure of Facebook. Someone may add a new band to his “favorite music” category. Friends may reveal their likes of scary movies or some other weired things. Actually, if one tells you in person, you seriously won’t care. But when someone updates their profile, of course, we are there checking it out.
True, every once in a while people hook up or break up, and without Facebook we might have to wait a couple of hours to get the news. But who wants to hear this stuff in person when the message can be delivered by Facebook’s tactful “broken-heart” icon? Probably no one! Another thing everyone likes on Facebook is when people add photos, another enjoyable diversion. But, to me, I can’t help but feel a strictly Facebook-related kind of shame when I realize I’ve spent the last 15 or so minutes clicking through pictures full of people I don’t even know, discovering the test of exhaustion and depression.
If a photograph can steal your soul, what can an online profile do? Facebook keeps constant tabs on us all. It wants our current status and our vacation plans. It makes sure we are searchable at all times. You think Facebook is taking you places, connecting you with the world. But it’s really just putting you in your place, and your place is Facebook. This site is not your friend. It’s an insidious assault on your time and your brain cells. It doesn’t just want your soul, it already has it. Admit it: you are Facebook’s slave. You check in and report your doings, you read its messages, you receive its gifts. There is no escape. This is your world now. Sure, you can just take your butt offline. But the dark lord knows you can’t survive long without a news feed.
In the end, we ask ourselves, “what are we doing with our lives? I always used to think to much of TV was the devil, but I was wrong. Facebook and co. must be infinitely worse than reruns of “Friends”.
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