"Meta’s failures contributed to abuses against Tigrayan community during conflict in northern Ethiopia", 31 October 2023

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, contributed to serious human rights abuses against Ethiopia’s Tigrayan community, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

A death sentence for my father: Meta’s contribution to human rights abuses in northern Ethiopia, shows how Meta has once again failed to adequately curb the spread of content advocating hatred and violence, this time targeting Tigrayans during the November 2020 to November 2022 armed conflict in northern Ethiopia...

...“Three years after its staggering failures in Myanmar, Meta has once again – through its content-shaping algorithms and data-hungry business model – contributed to serious human rights abuses. Even before the outbreak of the conflict in northern Ethiopia, civil society organizations and human rights experts repeatedly warned that Meta risked contributing to violence in the country, and pleaded with the company to take meaningful action,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“However, Meta ignored these warnings and did not take appropriate mitigation measures, even after the conflict had broken out. As a result, Meta has again contributed to serious human rights abuses, this time perpetrated against the Tigrayan community.”...

...Internal Meta documents reviewed by Amnesty International show that Meta knew of the inadequacies of its mitigation measures in Ethiopia and the risks this presented in a country that the company itself considered to be at a high risk of violence. An internal Meta document from 2020 warned that “current mitigation strategies are not enough” to stop the spread of harmful content on the Facebook platform in Ethiopia...

[Meta commented that they are not able to comment because the content of the report "pertains to matters currently subject to litigation involving Meta Platforms, Inc. before the High Court of Kenya..."]