Social Media Is Encouraging A New “All-Out War” Between Ethiopia And Eritrea, Researchers Warn

The Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute is calling on social media companies to address the spread of violent speech and warmongering on their platforms to stop a looming war between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Researchers at the institute have spent three years analyzing social media platforms’ role in exacerbating the 2020-2022 Tigray war and believe similar failures are happening again.

“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,” the researchers say.

Social media’s role in amplifying the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict

Dr. Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director of DAIR Institute, was working at Google when the war started. She saw the genocidal speech targeting Tigrayans on social media firsthand and wanted to take action.

After speaking to colleagues at Google, she asked to build language technology and have basic moderation in so-called “under-resourced languages” like Tigrinya. However, her concerns were not acknowledged, and she was told that AI removes 95% of hate speech on Facebook. A month later, she was fired.

Gebru and other researchers spent three years documenting the failures of social media platforms. “We partnered with Lesan, founded by Asmelash Teka Hadgu, to create those tools. We collaborated with content moderators like Fasica Berhane to understand the horrific working conditions of moderators,” she said in a LinkedIn post.

In 2021, Facebook claimed to do “longstanging work to protect people in Ethiopia” when faced with its moderation failures during the 2020-2022 Tigray war which led to genocide of Tigrayans. The researchers claim that “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.”

Dair’s first academic paper on the topic will be presented at CHI conference in Japan in May.

Meta Facing $2.4 Billion Lawsuit For Fuelling Violence In Ethiopia

Meanwhile, a landmark lawsuit seeks to hold Meta accountable for its role in fuelling the ethnic violence. A Kenyan recently ruled that high court has ruled that the $2.4 billion lawsuit, brought by Abrham Meareg, Fisseha Tekle, and The Katiba Institute, could proceed.

They argue that Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech and inciteful content, fueling violence during the country’s civil war. They also claim the platform’s design allowed dangerous content to go viral, ultimately leading to grave human rights violations.

Image: Getty