A statement from @DAIR at https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/tigray-social/

"For the last 3 years, we have been researching and documenting the role of social media platforms in exacerbating the 2020-2022 Tigray war. We performed computational analyses to quantify the level of hate speech on these platforms, and interviewed content moderators to better understand the organizational practices that have resulted in the platforms’ failures to adequately curb genocidal language. These platforms pledged to do better following the revelation that they promoted violence that incited genocide against the Rohingya in 2016. Facebook claimed to do “longstanging work to protect people in Ethiopia” when confronted with its moderation failures during the 2020-2022 Tigray war which resulted in the genocide of Tigrayans. But we are seeing an acceleration of the same type of warmongering on social media platforms that we documented at the beginning of the catastrophic Tigray war in 2020.

It's not enough to perform a postmortem analysis after millions have been killed, maimed, or displaced, and merely promise to do better without delivering on that promise....

This spread of violent language is not unique to Facebook. Clear calls for mass violence and warmongering on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube are exponentially growing with no signs of action by these companies. Supporters and opponents of both the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have spent months antagonizing each other on these platforms, threatening to destroy each other on the battlefield, promoting the recruitment of fighters, and demonizing enemy factions. Renowned Ethiopian government-backed activists with hundreds of thousands of followers have flooded these platforms with clear calls for all-out war against Eritrea and the annexation of its territory."

#Ethiopia#Eritrea#Meta#Facebook#TikTok