Facebook aware of inflammatory Ethiopian posts

On 30 August, an Ethiopian Facebook user, who goes by the name Northern Patriot Tewodros Kebede Ayo, posted a clear incitement to violence on his page. He accused the Qimant, an ethnic minority in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, of supporting the opposition forces and singled out the Qimant residents of Aykel, a small town in Amhara. Writing in Amharic, he said ‘the punishment has been imposed … the clean-up continues’. Two days later, 12 residents were dragged from their homes and butchered on the street, allegedly by members of the Fano militia, an Amhara nationalist paramilitary group that has been implicated in multiple atrocities. This was reported at the time by Al Jazeera, and two sources have independently confirmed this account. The Mail & Guardian reports that there is no evidence that there is a direct causal link between the Facebook posts and the massacre. What is clear is that Facebook employees already knew about these accounts and were worried about their potential to incite violence. Months earlier, in a leaked internal document, a team at Facebook had found that these accounts were key nodes in an online disinformation network aligned to the Fano militia. According to Facebook’s data, this network was co-ordinating ‘calls for violence and other armed conflict in Ethiopia’; and ‘promoting armed conflict, co-ordinated doxxing, recruiting and fund-raising for the militia’.