Meareg Amare was a respected chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. He was Tiger. A tiger in Amhara. Not an easy position, being an ethnic minority in the region where most of the rival ethnic minority live. Not an easy position, especially in the fall of 2021, with the escalation of the conflict between the Amhara and the Tigrayans in the Ethiopian civil war.
At that time, photos of Amare, his name, hate comments that defined him as an antagonist, a threat, began to appear on the Facebook platform. Abrham Meareg, Amare’s son, sees those posts. He reports them, as is often done on Meta’s social network. But Facebook doesn’t remove them.
On November 3, 2021, a group of men follows Amare from the university to his home, shoots him in front of the door. And he leaves him in agony for seven hours, threatening anyone who tries to approach or call for help to make him do the same thing.
A year after his father’s death, Abrham Meareg announced that he had filed a lawsuit against Meta, the company of Mark Zuckerberg that owns Facebook, for not having removed those contents that instigated hatred and violence. “I hold Facebook responsible for killing my father,” Abraham Meareg told Time, which covered the whole story.
The lawsuit against Facebook
In the lawsuit against Facebook, Meareg is not alone. After years of public complaints about the platform’s role in spreading hateful content in Ethiopia, in a climate of fervent discrimination and threats against ethnic minorities in the country, Fisseha Tekle, a former researcher at Amnesty International, gathered evidence of Facebook posts that prosecution says contributed to real-world murders, and decided to join the young Tigrinya in the lawsuit against Meta. Personally, he believes that the attacks he receives for his work via the platform have put his life and his business at even more risk than he did.
The lawsuit was filed in Kenya, not Ethiopia, because Nairobi is the base where Facebook content is moderated in sub-Saharan Africa. Where it is decided, that is, what can and cannot stay on the platform. Although the criticisms of Meta are nothing new, this is the first lawsuit that directly calls the company into question for responsibility for someone’s death. The plaintiffs are asking to take steps to scrutinize their content more, create a $1.6 billion fund for “victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook” and hire more moderators who understand and handle the Ethiopian language.
And they perhaps hope for an admission of guilt, perhaps even more peremptory than what happened in the case of Myanmar, when Facebook admitted that it had not done enough to prevent what various international observers have defined as a genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.