Meta faces $1.6bn lawsuit for allowing hateful posts during Ethiopia conflict
Petitioners demand that Meta create a reparation fund for victims of a war they say its 'profiteering' helped to fan
In a lawsuit filed in Kenya's high court this week, Meta has been accused of enabling hate-filled posts inciting violence on Facebook in Ethiopia.
The lawsuit claims that the social media giant's acts helped escalate the country's civil conflict between the government and rebel groups from the northern Tigray province, resulting in thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people.
Ethiopian researchers Abrham Meareg and Fisseha Tekle, as well as the Kenyan human rights group Katiba Institute, filed the lawsuit with support from legal non-profit Foxglove, Amnesty International and five other organisations.
According to court documents, Abrham Meareg's father, chemistry professor Meareg Amare, was killed outside his home in November 2021 after being targeted in a series of hateful posts on Facebook.
Abrham Mearag, who is ethnic Tigrayan, reported the posts to Facebook at the time, but the platform chose not to take them down right away or, in some instances, at all.
"If Facebook had just stopped the spread of hate and moderated posts properly, my father would still be alive," said Abrham Meareg.
"I'm taking Facebook to court so no one ever suffers as my family has again. I'm seeking justice for millions of my fellow Africans hurt by Facebook's profiteering - and an apology for my father's murder."
Additionally, Meta has been charged with failing to take reasonable care in training its algorithms to identify hateful and dangerous posts, and in failing to recruit personnel to monitor content for the languages spoken on the continent.
The plaintiffs are requesting that the court order Meta to take immediate action to demote violent content and increase the number of moderators in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the social media's main hubs in Africa. They are also asking the court to order Meta to create restitution funds of 200 billion Kenyan shillings ($1.6 billion) for victims of violence incited on Facebook.
"The spread of dangerous content on Facebook lies at the heart of Meta's pursuit of profit, as its systems are designed to keep people engaged," Amnesty's deputy regional director, Flavia Mwangovya, said.
A February investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Observer revealed that Facebook was allowing users to publish hateful and misleading material while fully aware of how it was contributing to tensions in Tigray.
Meta and Sama, its primary subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, are already facing another legal action in Kenya over allegations of forced labour and human trafficking, unfair labour relations, and the failure to offer appropriate mental health and psychological assistance to workers.
Ben Walters, a spokesman for Meta, told Associated Press that the company could not comment on the lawsuit because they had not received it.
In recent years, Facebook has faced criticism for continually expanding into nations with poor media literacy and failing to allocate enough resources to moderation in the local languages.
Last year, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar sued Meta in the UK and the US over allegations that the platform ignored inflammatory posts and hate speech against the ethnic group, leading to the genocide of its members in the south-east Asian country.
The lawsuit cited a probe by the United Nations that described Facebook as having played a "determining role" in the genocide of 24,000 Rohingya people in Myanmar.
In 2018, Facebook acknowledged in a blog post that it needs to "do more" to prevent its platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence in different parts of the world.
The social media platform was recently found to be "extremely poor" at identifying hate speech in the official language of Ethiopia in a Global Witness study.