Facebook's platform was used to spread hate speech and incite violence in Ethiopia during civil war and ethnic conflicts, despite internal warnings and inadequate content moderation in local languages.
Facebook's platform was extensively used to spread hate speech, misinformation, and content inciting violence in Ethiopia during multiple periods of civil unrest and war from 2018-2022. Internal Facebook documents revealed that the company knew it lacked adequate content moderation capabilities in Ethiopian languages like Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya. During the Tigray civil war that began in November 2020, Facebook was used by various actors including militias, government supporters, and diaspora groups to spread dehumanizing content targeting ethnic minorities, particularly Tigrayans. Specific incidents included posts calling for genocide, the targeting of university professor Meareg Amare who was subsequently murdered, and widespread sharing of graphic violence. Facebook employees repeatedly warned management about the platform being used to 'seed calls for violence' and that 'current mitigation strategies are not enough.' The company had only 25 content moderators covering Ethiopian content for a population of 117 million people. Despite being classified as a 'high-risk' country, Facebook lacked automated hate speech detection systems in major Ethiopian languages and relied heavily on user reports and experimental 'network-based moderation.' The violence resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, with estimates ranging from 385,000 to 600,000 civilian deaths in Tigray alone.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI that exposes users to harmful, abusive, unsafe or inappropriate content. May involve providing advice or encouraging action. Examples of toxic content include hate speech, violence, extremism, illegal acts, or child sexual abuse material, as well as content that violates community norms such as profanity, inflammatory political speech, or pornography.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed