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.
💭 Koki Tufa Folie from Ethiopia is the alleged Killer of Damaris Muthee Mutua
A Kenyan-born Bahraini athlete, Damaris Muthee Mutua has been murdered in Iten, Tom Makori, a town in the west of the country.
The runner’s Ethiopian boyfriend is a suspect in her killing and he is on the run, police said on Tuesday.
Mutua’s murder follows the killing of another athlete in Kenya, Olympic runner Agnes Tirop, who was found stabbed to death at her home in the same town in October.
The body of Mutua, 28, who holds dual Kenyan-Bahraini nationality, was found decomposing in a house, the town’s police commander, told Reuters.
Iten, where both murders occurred, has a popular training base for long distance runners.
The two murders have shone a spotlight on violence against women in the east African country.
“The body has been taken to a nearby hospital mortuary,” Makori said.
Reliable sources revealed that Koki Tufa who is also a long-distance runner had come in Kenya to visit Damaris who was living in a rented house at Lilies estate, Iten before she was found dead.
Tufa is alleged to have called one of his friends in Iten town informing him of what he had done before fleeing to Ethiopia.
He had been training at the same facility and has since fled Kenya, according to police.
“The suspect called a friend whom they were training together and informed him that he has killed a girlfriend and the body was in the house,” Makori said.
Koki Tufa Folie the alleged Killer of Damaris Muthee Mutua
The above and below photos were retrieved from his social media handle facebook, and it is believed that he has been Mutua’s boyfriend since 2014. This has surfaced after thorough research by our able team who traced his name and many of his photos that included Mutua’s on his timeline.
Keiyo North police boss Tom Makori was informed of the death by fellow athletes and he said preliminary investigations indicate the victim, who was killed some days ago had visited her Ethiopian boy friend who resides almost a kilometer from Iten police station.
😈 War Criminal and fake field marshal general Birhanu ‘Jini’ Jula visits Kenya.
Chief of Ethiopia National Defence Force Field Marshal General Birhanu Jula Galalcha on Wednesday, 30th March 2022 paid a courtesy call on Chief of the Defence Forces General Robert Kibochi at the Defence Headquarters in Nairobi.
Field Marshal General Birhanu inspected a half Guard of Honour mounted by Kenya Air Force troops and later held a closed-door meeting with the CDF and, a delegation of General and Senior Officers from both militaries.
Field Marshal General Birhanu also met the Cabinet Secretary for Defence Hon. Eugene Wamalwa in his office at the Defence Headquarters.
The meetings centred around bilateral defence relations, training and cooperation particularly in regards to support for the East Africa Standby Force (EASF) operations.
EASF is currently holding a Command Post Exercise dubbed, ‘Mashariki Salaam’ in Nairobi with the aim of assessing its structures and member states in planning, preparation and execution of multi-dimensional peace support operations.
The visiting CDF is expected to attend the Exercise’s closing ceremony scheduled for Thursday, 31st March 2022 in Karen, Nairobi.
👉 Let’s remember, Kaari Betty Murungi of Kenya is among three international experts appointed by the president of the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the human-rights situation in Ethiopia, to establish “the facts and circumstances surrounding the many violations, abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity that had been committed in Tigray by the fascist Oromo Army of Ethiopia lead by the fake field marshal general Birhanu Jula.
💭 An Ethnic Tigrayan Ethiopian marathon runner Teshome Mekonen Marks Third-Place Finish by staging a daring protest against atrocities in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region when he crossed the line at the New York City half-marathon on Sunday,
💭 Turkish embassy in Ethiopia forced to move to Kenya over insecurity
Turkey’s embassy in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa has been moved to neighboring Kenya due to threats after the deployment of Turkish drones by the Abiy Ahmed regime to suppress the Tigray rebellion, the T24 news website reported.
Although the Turkish government hadn’t made an official statement regarding the sale of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to the Ethiopian government, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had visited the country and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan twice in the past six months, adding to the widespread belief that drones bought from Turkey, in addition to Iran and the United Arab Emirates, had changed the course of the civil war in Ethiopia, journalist Barçın Yinanç wrote in an article on the T24 news website on Monday.
“Turkey’s embassy in Addis Ababa cannot operate from the capital due to threats it has received. The ambassador and several embassy staff are serving from [neighboring] Kenya. There was no statement from the [Turkish] Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the matter,” the journalist said.
The conflict that has been going on for over a year in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than 2 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
Forces under Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias, and troops from neighboring Eritrea, are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.
In early November, the government teetered when fighters from Tigray surged south toward Addis Ababa, forcing the prime minister to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
But weeks later Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
He succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. However, his fortunes were greatly boosted by a fleet of armed drones, recently imported from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran, that pummeled the Tigrayan forces, according to a report by The New York Times last week.
A drone strike on a flour mill in May Tsebri, a town in the northwest of Ethiopia (Tigray region), reportedly killed 17 people on Monday January 10 and injured dozens more, according to eyewitnesses.
The January 10 bombings came just days after a similar attack on a camp for displaced persons in Dedebit killed 59 and injured nearly 140 on Friday January 7.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 27, 2018
The Chinese government has finally spoken on seizing Mombasa port over debt owed by the Kenya government.
The Asian nation dismissed allegation that Kenyan government used Mombasa port as collateral for a loan to construction the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).
“We have checked with the relevant Chinese financial institution and found that the allegation that the Kenyan government used the Mombasa port as a collateral in its payment agreement for Nairobi-Mombasa railway is not true,” a statement issued by Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated.
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