A death sentence for my father: Meta’s contribution to human rights abuses in northern Ethiopia, report recently published by Amnesty International, 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.

Amnesty International has previously highlighted Meta’s contribution to human rights violations against the Rohingya in Myanmar and warned against the recurrence of these harms if Meta’s business model and content-shaping algorithms were not fundamentally reformed.

“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.

Meta’s contribution to human rights abuses

Amnesty International’s research established that Facebook’s algorithmic systems supercharged the spread of harmful rhetoric targeting the Tigrayan community, while the platform’s content moderation systems failed to detect and respond appropriately to such content.

These failures ultimately contributed to the killing of Tigrayan university chemistry Professor Meareg Amare. Amare was killed by a group of men after posts targeting him were posted on Facebook on 3 November 2021.