Ethiopians suing Meta for failing to moderate content that amplified violence that left more than half a million dead during the Tigray war have been given the green light to serve the social media giant outside Kenya. This is the latest case that seeks to force Facebook to stop amplifying violent, hateful, and inflammatory posts.
A Kenyan court on Thursday granted the petitioners permission to serve Meta in California, US, after they failed to track down the social media giant’s office locally. It turns out that although Meta has business operations in Kenya, it doesn’t have a physical office, with its local staff working remotely.
The decision paves the way for a lawsuit filed in December last year by Kenyan rights group The Ketba Institute and Ethiopian researchers Fesiha Tekele and Abraham Mirage. The lawsuit alleged that Mirage’s father, Professor Mirage Amari Abraha, was killed during the Tigray War after he made corrupt Facebook posts and called for violence against him.
The petitioners seek to force Meta to stop viral hate on Facebook, step up content review at the Kenya Moderation Center, and create a $1.6 billion compensation fund.
The petitioners claim that Facebook’s algorithm amplified hateful and inflammatory posts that attracted more interactions and kept users logged in longer.
They claim that Facebook is “uninvested” in reviewing human content at the center in Kenya, putting lives at risk because it ignores, refuses, or acts slowly to remove posts that also violate its Community Standards.
Merrig said his family has first-hand experience of how editing flawed content can put people’s lives at risk and break families apart.
His father was allegedly murdered after Meta failed to act on repeated requests to take down posts targeting him and other Tigrayans, as calls for a massacre against the ethnic group spread online and off. The Tigray War, which lasted for two years, broke out in November 2020 after the Ethiopian army clashed with Tigray forces, killing 600,000 people.
“My father was killed because posts on Facebook identified him, falsely accused him, leaked the address of where he lived and called for his death,” said Mirage, a former PhD student, adding that he was forced to flee the country and seek asylum in the US after his father’s death.
My father’s case is not an isolated case. Around the time of those posts and his death, Facebook was full of hateful, inflammatory, and dangerous posts… And many other tragedies like ours have happened.”
Meta declined to comment.
Mirage says he reported on the posts he found, but his reports were either dismissed or ignored. He claims he reported several posts in 2021, including one containing dead bodies, and some of those posts were still on the social site by the time he went to court last December.
He criticized Facebook’s content review, saying the center in Kenya had only 25 moderators responsible for Amharic, Tigrinya and Oromo content, which left 82 other languages without personnel to oversee.
Meta previously told TechCrunch that it has hired teams and technology to help it remove hate speech and incitement, and that it has partners and employees with local knowledge to help it develop methods to catch offending content.
“It has allowed a flaw to grow within Facebook, turning it into a weapon to spread hate, violence and even genocide,” said Martha Darke, director of Foxglove, a tech justice NGO supporting the cause. “Meta can take real action, today, to pull the plug on the spread of hate through Facebook.”
This is not the first time Meta has been accused of fueling violence in Ethiopia. Whistleblower Frances Hogan previously accused it of “literally fueling ethnic violence” in Ethiopia, and an investigation by Global Witness indicated that Facebook was poor at detecting hate speech in Ethiopia’s main language.
Currently, social media platforms, including Facebook, remain blocked in Ethiopia since early February after state-led plans to split the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewhado Church caused anti-government protests.
Addition to meta problems in kenya
Meta is facing three lawsuits in Kenya.
The company and its content review partner in sub-Saharan Africa, Sama, were sued in Kenya last May for exploitation and breach of the union by Daniel Motaung, its former content manager.
Motung alleged that Sama fired him for organizing a 2019 strike that sought to unite Sama employees. He was suing Mita and Sama for forced labour, exploitation and human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide “appropriate” mental health psychosocial support.
Meta has sought to have her name removed from the lawsuit, saying that Mutung is not her employee, and that the Kenyan court has no jurisdiction over the case. However, it failed to stop the lawsuit after the court ruled that it had a case to answer, because some aspects of how the company operates in the country make it liable. The social media giant has appealed the court’s decision.
Earlier this month, Meta was sued along with Sama and another content review partner, Majorelle, by 183 content moderators who allege they were unlawfully laid off and blacklisted. Moderators claimed that they were illegally fired by Sama after it dropped its content review arm, and that Meta directed its new partner in Luxembourg, Majorel, to blacklist former Sama content moderators.
Meta has also sought to be excluded from the case, but last week the Kenyan court said it had jurisdiction over employer-employee disputes and “matters of alleged illegal and unfair termination of employment on the grounds of redundancy” and that it had power “to enforce the alleged violation of human rights.” and Fundamental Freedoms” by Meta, Sama and Majorelle.