“A Death Sentence For My Father”: Meta’s contribution to human rights abuses in Northern Ethiopia

In November 2020, a brutal conflict broke out in northern Ethiopia. In 2021, whistle-blower Frances Haugen said that the Facebook platform was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places like Ethiopia.

This report is based on an investigation into Meta’s role in the serious human rights abuses perpetrated against the Tigrayan community between 2020 and 2022. It reveals the devastating impacts that the Facebook platform’s surveillance-based business model had in the context of Ethiopia’s armed conflict. It shows that, despite the company’s claim to have learned the lessons of its contribution to the atrocities against the Rohingya in 2017, many of the same systemic failures occurred again in Ethiopia.

Despite a recommendation from its own Facebook Oversight Board to conduct a human rights impact assessment in Ethiopia, Meta has to date failed to adequately engage with its contribution to serious human rights harms in the Ethiopian context. However, Amnesty International’s analysis highlights the urgency of this issue, and underlines the necessity of wideranging reforms and meaningful regulation to ensure that Meta does not continue to contribute to human rights abuses in Ethiopia, or in any other conflict-affected setting