1 of 3 | Many voices inside Africa have expressed growing concerns about Facebook being deliberately used by militants to spread disinformation campaigns that serve to enflame ethnic and religious tensions. File photo by Kon Karampelas/Unsplash
Dec. 14 (UPI) -- A class-action lawsuit filed in Kenya seeks more than $2 billion from Facebook over accusations the social media giant is profiting from content that promotes ethnic and political violence throughout Africa.
The most notable plaintiff in the legal action is Ethiopian professor Abraham Meareg, a U.S. asylum seeker living in Minneapolis who claims his father was killed by militants last year due in part to incendiary content that is allowed to circulate on the platform.
The case came before a court this week in Nairobi, where Facebook opened a content moderation hub nearly four years ago in an effort to expand its enterprise into vast, undeveloped portions of Eastern and Southern Africa.
The suit alleges Facebook has been promoting ongoing ethnic conflicts in the region by monetizing content about the ongoing strife, which if confirmed would violate numerous laws in the country.
A spokesman for Facebook's parent company, Meta, issued a statement on Tuesday, noting that the company follows strict content protocols and acknowledging that some technological capabilities were still being developed to overcome language barriers in the region.
"We have strict rules that outline what is and isn't allowed on Facebook and Instagram," Mike DelMoro wrote. "Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our safety and integrity work in Ethiopia. We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise and continue to develop our capabilities to catch violating content in the most widely spoken languages in the country, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya."
The lawsuit also calls out weak content policing efforts in Kenya that don't match Facebook's resolve in tamping down violent content in other countries, particularly the United States.
Facebook has faced criticism in recent years for allowing hate speech and inflammatory content to go viral on the platform amid ethnic violence in India and Myanmar.
A study by Amnesty International released earlier this year found that Facebook content likely contributed to the humanitarian crisis that struck Myanmar's Rohingya population in 2017.
Many expert voices inside Africa have expressed growing concerns about Facebook being deliberately used by militants to spread disinformation campaigns that serve to enflame ethnic and religious tensions.
Meareg said Facebook allowed this content to remain on the site despite his father's pleas for its removal. Ultimately, Meareg's father, Meareg Amare Abrha, would become a casualty in Ethiopia's ongoing civil war.
On Nov. 3, 2021, several men on motorcycles followed the chemistry professor as he left Bahir Dar University campus for the day and gunned him down soon after he arrived home, according to an affidavit filed in the case. From there, militants seized the family's house, which forced Abrha's widow to flee to Ethiopia.
"My father didn't get any chance to convince people that he was innocent," Meareg told NBC News. "He didn't get the choice to clarify the hate speech and disinformation. They just shot him and killed him in a brutal way."
The affidavit filed by Meareg claims the Facebook page "BDU Staff" posted a picture of his father on Oct. 9, 2021, and announced to 50,000 followers that the professor was "hiding" at the university after alleged crimes and abuses against tenants at his properties. The comments section on the post erupted in calls for violence with some voices identifying Abrha's neighborhood.
"These posts were a death sentence for my father," Meareg says in the affidavit.
"Facebook is a big gun, social media platform in Ethiopia," he said. "Facebook knows the platform is used for genocide, ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial killings. And intentionally, due to their deliberate dismissal of the consequences and harm, they just prefer to focus on their profit-making."
One attorney involved with the case said countries like Kenya and Ethiopia lack the financial resources to implement serious content moderation controls.
"However bad you and I think content moderation is in the U.S., it is an order of magnitude worse anywhere outside of the U.S. -- and particularly bad in places facing crisis or conflict," Cori Crider, a director at the United Kingdom-based nonprofit Foxglove LegalCrider, told NBC News. "When people make posts calling for genocide or targeting people in certain areas, posts will go viral and it will not come down. What happened to Abrham's father is horrific and also systemic."
