When Ethiopian university student Moti Dereje logged into his Facebook account in late November 2018, he expected to see regular updates from his friends and family.
Instead, the 19-year-old, who was studying in the capital Addis Ababa, saw a shocking post.
“While I was updating my news feed, I saw my father’s dead body lying there,” he told the BBC’s The Comb podcast.
Moti was not only devastated to see such a horrible image, but that was how he discovered that his father had been murdered.
“I froze at that moment. It was really shocking for me,” he says.
Ethiopia has been experiencing political unrest in various regions for the past few years and social media have been inundated with graphic images and videos, misinformation and publications that incite violence.
Activists are calling for more to be done to moderate platforms and remove such content before it does any harm.
Moti, instead of seeing the deleted photo like she wanted, she started finding more posts showing the same image.
His father, a former MP who worked as a university administrator, was the target of a political assassination in western Oromia.
The region was going through a period of turmoil at the time with frequent murders.
“It’s as if They were celebrating killing him. It was painful,” he explains.
wave of violence
The BBC was able to see 15 of these posts, which Moti said he reported to Facebook in the hope that they would be removed.
Facebook’s community standards state that it will remove “videos and photos depicting the violent death of someone when a family member requests their removal.”
But for more than four years, and after Moti said she reported the posts multiple times, they remained online.
A graphic content warning was only placed on some of the images.
“Sometimes I get depressed and I can’t help but look up his name and check the posts. I think I’m a bit traumatized,” says Moti.
When asked by the BBC for a comment, Facebook’s parent company Meta indicated that while the images alone did not violate its policy on violent and graphic content, it would remove the posts due to the request of a family member. .
All posts showing the photo of Moti’s dead father have now been removed.
There is currently no mechanism in Facebook’s reporting system for family members to make these requests, but Meta told the BBC it was testing a new form to do so.
“Ethiopian Content Ignored”
Concern over the volume of graphic content and hate speech being shared on Ethiopian social media is growing.
This was a problem before 2020, but when the war broke out in the northern region of Tigray in November of that year, the amount of violent content making it into people’s news feeds increased dramatically.
In 2021, Facebook’s Supervisory Board recommended that the company commission an independent investigation specifically for Ethiopia, to review how the platform has been used to spread hate speech and escalate violence.
This review has not been carried out.
The BBC asked Meta about this, and a spokesperson highlighted an earlier response from the company, saying it would assess the feasibility of such a review, and that it had previously carried out multiple forms of human rights due diligence related to Ethiopia.
It was announced last year that Meta was being sued by two Ethiopians who alleged that Facebook’s algorithm helped fuel the viral spread of hate and violence.
Meta responded by saying that it has invested heavily in moderation and technology to remove hate.
But Rehobot Ayalew, an Addis Ababa-based fact-checking consultancy, questions how much social media companies are doing to address the problem.
“I don’t think the platforms are paying that much attention to Ethiopia,” he told the BBC.
“I know Facebook says they have Ethiopian-focused moderators who speak Amharic and Tigrinya, but we don’t know how many. And they’re not even working from Ethiopia, they’re working in Kenya.”
The impact of this, according to Rehobot, is that violent content often stays online for too long.
“It usually takes a long time to remove a toxic post,” he says.
“Arousing Anger”
Rehobot is referencing a widely shared video in March 2022, in which a Tigray man was burned alive.
“First, artificial intelligence by itself it should have removed it“, Explain.
“Then, even after it was reported, it should have been removed quickly, but it stayed for a few hours.”
A Meta spokesperson told the BBC: “We have strict rules outlining what is and is not allowed on Facebook and Instagram. Hate speech and incitement to violence are against these rules and we invest heavily in equipment and technology to help us find and remove this content.
“We employ staff with local knowledge and experience, and continue to develop our capabilities to detect infringing content in the most widely spoken languages in the country, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya.”
Good can come from drawing public attention to egregious human rights abuses, but this type of content can also be used to provoke anger and blame specific ethnic groups or individuals.
Meanwhile, thousands if not millions of Ethiopians feel the traumatic effects of viewing such content.
A peace agreement was signed in November last year with the aim of ending the war in Tigray and beginning to address the dire humanitarian situation it has caused.
The number of people killed is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, with most of those deaths due to starvation and a lack of medical supplies as a result of the fighting.
Meanwhile, unrest still grips the Oromia region, which has seen a growing rebellion.
Activists fear that reconciliation in these cases is hampered by violence published on social networks.
“People tend to believe [las publicaciones] and act accordingly, so widespread violent and destructive images can surely set back the peace and reconciliation process,” Rehobot said.
Moti, now 23, is trying to move on with his life, pursuing a career as a videographer and photographer, and is even making a documentary about his own experience.
“I think it’s time to tell my own story trying to stand up for myself and maybe if I’m successful I can make a change,” he says.
But he says the prevalence of graphic content will continue to worry him until it can be brought under control.
“Every time I see a picture of a dead body posted on the internet or on Facebook because of the Ethiopian war, I feel really sad. Someone else is going to feel what I have felt. It really makes me very sick.”
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