Ethiopia civil war: Meta sued for $2 billion over 'hateful content'

Meta Platforms enabled violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia to flourish on Facebook that further inflamed the country's bloody civil war, accused a new lawsuit filed against Mark Zuckerberg-owned technology conglomerate.

The lawsuit was filed in Kenya on Tuesday by two Ethiopian researchers and Kenyan rights group the Katiba Institute. The lawsuit against Meta alleged that Facebook's recommendations systems amplified violent posts in Ethiopia, including various posts of violent natures that preceded the murder of the father of one of the researchers.

The lawsuit described Facebook posts published in October 2021 that used ethnic slurs to refer to the father of plaintiff Abrham Meareg.

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The posts shared the elderlyman's address and called for his death. Abrham Mearag, one of the plaintiffs,reported them to Facebook, but the company declined to remove them promptly or in some cases at all, the lawsuit alleged.

Lawsuit demands $2 billion in ‘restitution funds’

It further said that the company failed to exercise reasonable care in training its algorithms to identify dangerous posts and in hiring staff to police the content for the languages covered by its Nairobi-based regional moderation hub.

Meta spokesperson Erin McPike said that hate speech and incitement to violence were against the rules of Facebook and Instagram.

"We invest heavily in teams and technology to help us find and remove this content," McPike added. "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 Ethiopia."

The plaintiffs have reportedly asked a Nairobi court to order Meta to take "emergency steps to demote violent content" by increasing moderation staff in Nairobi and creating "restitution funds of about $2 billion for victims of violence incited on Facebook".

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Meta has faced similar accusations related to the promotion of ethnic violence on its platforms, including in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Cambodia. The company has acknowledged being "too slow" to act in Myanmar and other conflicts.

The US government estimated that as many as 500,000 people have been killed in the conflict that erupted in 2020 between Ethiopian government and rebels from the northern Tigray region.

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