the tagra war was one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history Facebook has been accused time and time again of stoking ethnic tensions in Ethiopia social media had a lot of roles like one is calling for violence that's why it was one of the atrocious was we have seen in the uh in the last few decades the onslaught of violence claimed the lives of half a million people Massacre them kill without Mercy you must murder them ruthlessly does Facebook put profit and Market power above the lives of human beings countless hate posts are still online
they kill someone or maybe let's go and burn these religious places like temples or mosques also pointing out someone's house like someone is like hiding here let's go and uh kill him or kill her how could The Social Network that promised people an open and interconnected World become a weapon used by warmongers and perpetrators social media is one of the hate speech instigators because people use it wrongly without us you wouldn't even like to go on Facebook for one second I'm hatred is one of the most important factors to win a war we must have
it delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete delete after 2 years of Devastation there's a festive Spirit back on the streets of the Tagan Capital Mich ashenda an event celebrating women and girls is being held for the first time since before the war but amid the singing and dancing in traditional garments the scars of War are everywhere [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] mulu mesin is a head nurse she's heard countless reports of the sexual violence perpetrated during the conflict she runs the One-Stop Center for rape victims at Ider Hospital one of
the few clinics in Michael that was not destroyed [Music] this 40-year-old woman reported being raped repeatedly by 15 soldiers in a remote Village before losing Consciousness she remembers that one of them took out his phone and started filming it was around 9 in the morning I blacked out after they attacked me I must have been lying there all day nobody helped me when I came to in the evening everything was gone everything I had with me social media was used as a weapon in the tagry war footage of rape and mass shootings was used to
traumatize and dehumanize the other side mein's explanation for the sheer brutality of the conflict is that the propaganda spread online by all parties was posted and reposted there was this constant preaching of hate on both social media and mainstream media especially in amhara media the Government tried to gloss over it by using terms like mission for Law and Order but people were being told to kill innocent Civ ions to abuse children and women from TIG and rape teenagers the victims had to run for their lives with nothing to eat and move from one refugee camp
to the next The War Began when the Ethiopian Army sent troops into tgra the northernmost part of the country a violent Civil War ensued many observers felt it bore all the markers of [Music] genocide one such Observer was FAA Tech from Amnesty International the way it was fought was extremely brutal within like less than a week the micar Massac has happened about 200 people working overnight in small farming uh Village in Western t uh and after that uh Massacre after Massacre Facebook played a pivotal role in the conflict with atrocities directly linked to hate speech
posted on the platform incendiary posts were not just tolerated they were actively disseminated by government officials and media Outlets fuel to the fire in an already deeply polarized and divided Society they should be known as the last of their kind nothing like Satan was created after Satan's fall once the war has started the of course the mood on the ground has changed so that's that also reflects on the social media and the Govern government was kind of uh leading on that uh they were coining terms which were kind of accepted by the general population for
instance y Chief among the agitators was the Ethiopian Prime Minister ABI Ahmed the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laurate he United the country's various ethnic groups in hatred against tigan he repeatedly referred to them as the cancer of Ethiopia as weeds that needed to be removed and as a hun online posts by ABI Ahmed and his advisers made no secret of their goal genocide these people are the enemy of all Ethiopian people the enemy of the aromo people the afar the gambela and the Somali we will not rest until the enemy is buried for the woman
in the Michael Clinic her fear of returning to her Village and the stigmatization she faces is too great The Head Nurse mulu mesin offers her a place in a women's shelter for the time being but the incendiary videos are still online for anyone to see what explains the inaction on the part of Facebook and other social media [Music] platforms one answer can be found in the Kenyan Capital Nairobi kauna malgi is on her way to her night shift for a job that involves deleting hate posts online when she moved here from West Africa some 3
years ago she was looking forward to a career in the booming Tech scene that at least was what was promised in the job offer as content moderator [Music] Malu signed up and did in fact find herself working for Facebook albeit indirectly her immediate employer was a lowprofile subcontractor called SAS Source the work of content moderator is quite a very dangerous work but at the same time it's also a very Noble work to do because we are like the internet or the social social media soldiers or firefighters and all that so we're there to protect people
from watching the most toxic and unacceptable things that human is supposed to watch so inside of the world to see it we are the ones behind the scenes watching those toxic contents at summer it wasn't just the content that was toxic the working conditions were appalling too Mal's job description referred to tagging images and writing brief texts there was no mention of violent content on her very first shift she had to watch footage of a person being beaten to death delete delete delete it was her introduction to a job that meant being presented with a
new harrowing video every 55 seconds for 8 hours a day delete delete delete without us you wouldn't even like to go on Facebook for one second if those things we see are being released to everyone to see Facebook would have been long gone by now no one would want to log in there while Facebook spends millions and employs thousands of moderators to review content in Europe and the US the budget for Africa is minimal the early wage there is $2.20 with just 200 moderators for the entire continent When The tagry War Began there were just
five covering Ethiopia then once the crisis like broke out we start receiving more uh graphic tickets uh hate speech and in inciting people uh for example people might share their opinion about the other tribes the other ethnic groups maybe to big killed to be chased out of a particular place to be banned to be uh little like to be arrested fasika gidan narrowly escaped the war she fled to Nairobi where she was grateful to find work as a Content moderator at SAS Source but soon enough the war caught up with her in her new job
the thing is when I talk about them I would have flashbacks and I don't want to have flashbacks cuz it will you know make me emotional or you know so I just try not to you know imagine what I saw but basically it's just the worst thing that you can imagine content is pre-screened by a computer algorithm but a human being ultimately decides what gets deleted critics have repeatedly called for the Improvement of moderators working conditions one such critic is Kenyan lawyer Mercy mutemi who says Facebook clearly failed in its duties content moderation was taking
place in Kenya for the content that was being shared in Ethiopia the content moderators that were being given this job were not even drawn from the communities in whose language that kind of content was being posted for example in this case tigia there was no tigia content moderator so when you tell someone who doesn't understand the language to moderate that post what's going to happen again if you only have a handful of moderators to CER for the Ethiopian market and there are millions of posts that are being shared on a daily basis that are violating
the Community standards the efficacy is going to be super super disappointing the lawyer has been representing the moderators in a legal dispute with meta the parent company of Facebook they're demanding better working conditions and psychological counseling MMI believes Facebook is driven by greed and Kenya a country with low wages and lacks working conditions has become a hub for Content moderation from meta and Tik Tok to open AI all the major online platforms employ so-called click workers what's considered to be cheap and dispensable labor they've capitalized on this culture of instilling fear in the moderators so
you're supposed to fear the poverty you come from because they use statements like we can return you back to your poverty as a matter of fact this is the first instance I'm I'm seeing a case where in the recruitment advertisements they specifically want people who came from poor backgrounds and they specifically asked that question in interviews like do you come from a poor background which in our constition that is a legal issue so there's that constant threat that you're going to lose your job but then at the same time there's a constant threat that we
could destroy your life you just don't know how we could do it but we could destroy your life we're just like hidden behind those computer behind the Facebook where people feel it's safe and now we ourself are totally damaged at the end of the day we're damaged we're destroyed our future is normal because of the kind of job we engaged ourself to do which we never thought it was that dangerous we just like forced to do it like through the deceptive way they recruited us [Music] someone who has experienced the deadly real life consequences of
online hate is this young woman she's gripped by fear when she walks down the city streets not long ago tigan like her were subjected to arbitrary detention with tens of thousands disappearing in camps she herself lost her father and brother the woman grew up in a village in eastern Ethiopia where Tans constitute a minority her father was a well-off farmer and respected businessman but when the war broke out he and eight other residents were targeted in a hate campaign a post on Facebook claimed they were spies and called for attacks on them her father was
at the top of the list of targets [Applause] [Music] the post went viral and was shared hundreds of times in the region for one local militia it was proof enough they raided The Village looking for the alleged spies plundering homes belonging to ethnic Tans the young woman was living in Adis Ababa at the time her mother told her what happened when the militia men entered the family's house first they forced my father my brother and my mother to get on their knees they then had to cry crawl out of the house my mother pleaded with
them saying they were regular people just caring for their children she asked why us but the men didn't respond they said my family were spies fighting against the government they kept repeating the accusations being spread on Facebook that was the last time my mother saw my father and my brother her father and brother were shot dead in their own yard when the attackers moved on to raid other homes her mother took the opportunity to escapee she says that 22 people were murdered that day a massacre that she blames on Facebook I'm sure of it nothing
would have happened to my family had it not been for the misinformation on Facebook people are too reliant on Facebook they believe everything that's posted there in my Village they don't question if what they're reading on social media is true or false they just accept it I know that my father and brother would still be alive if that post hadn't appeared on Facebook the killing of her father and brother was not an isolated incident the tagry war saw thousands of doxing posts online attacks revealing the name address and photo of targets as the world's biggest
social networking site Facebook is a natural Avenue for the dissemination of such posts plus its algorithm ensures that insightful and inflammatory posts are viewed by an especially large number of people what has become very clear is that hate cells and um harmful posts Trend more than posts that are you know innocent the MSI um metric to the algorithm encourages posts that are likely to go viral to go even more viral right so if you learn that and you're in the habit of posting inflammatory content you're just going to keep making it that much worse and
much more inflammatory Facebook earns its money through advertising and the mass Gathering of user data viral posts and user interaction in the form of likes shares and comments are especially valuable so valuable in fact that despite security concerns raised by Facebook employees risk mitigating measures were never incorporated into the algorithm in the case of Ethiopia this led to more polarization more hate and more misinformation the saddest part is just how we had to produce all this evidence for Ethiopia of posts that have gone viral and were still on the Facebook platform instigating violence right and
all those posts violate the Facebook Community standards but were not pulled down [Music] in Nairobi the individuals ostensibly employed to make Facebook safer were fired after kauna Malu fasika gidan and 182 other content moderators sued metam and their direct employer Source they were immediately dismissed not just content review was left in the Lurch the moderators were left without pay for months Unsure how to cover their rent and other basic [Music] expenses to this is a real therapy the two women meet on the roof of Mal's apartment building painting has helped them to process their traumatic
experiences malgi has been struggling with severe depression ever since she took the job as content moderator I just wish I'm just out of this world I've had enough already had enough I grew up without a dad and I thought I would have family members that would support me and all that but obviously no one I'm going through a lot even if I've eaten I've not no one cares even if I'm dead or alive sometimes I just feel I can end it all but at the same time when I look at my mom I don't want
to to feel hot so I just have to pretend like everything is okay kauna Malu says the images during her time at samasaurus6 among her former colleagues a young man who hanged himself in his apartment the former moderators hope that their legal action will help to create better working conditions to do this difficult job and ideally changes will be made to Facebook's algorithm that prevent harmful content from being Amplified and going viral fasika gabreon often had the impression that her work was in vain not only insults or negative words that people would uh report on
the contents uh also there was so many videos that was flagged by us but never get deleted so especially um graphic videos uh we were tired of flagging them because you know once you see it and then you you get traumatized every time you see it so that's why we always FL them to be deleted but they never got deleted I should have G and you know find [Music] a the young woman whose father and brother were killed is on her way to the recording studio of a local YouTuber in Adis Ababa she's the only
member of her family who will talk frankly about what happened she's determined to ensure that the killing of her loved ones will have consequences the post that led to their deaths is still online [Music] fake news on social media kills innocent people I hope I'm able to show that to the big Facebook pages with lots of followers as well as to ordinary users and that they understand how their posts can destroy lives we need to raise awareness but people also need to be punished I know that's not not easy it's a real challenge but we
need Justice and I hope we'll make some progress that we can create an awareness in society about the harmful impact of fake news on Facebook and other sites that's why I'm here sharing my story the lawyer Mercy MMI has already already seen some progress It's a political case right a court in Kenya ruled that theasaurus dismissals were unlawful and the moderators needed to be reinstated and paid how how would your security be if you both the company and meow will have to answer to the courts in Kenya the Ethiopia case is pivotal before it is
now and having seen that there were so many warnings about what's happening in Ethiopia and the role of Ethiopia and how many reports people had made on what's happening on the platform just the inaction itself led to the platform being weaponized in a very vulnerable situation so there's a lot of responsibility around that you might not have picked the gun but you knew what was happening and you chose to do nothing about it people spoke about it people even followed your internal procedure which is report post we will pull them down they were not pulled
down so that inaction led to way more violence and way more loss of lives no they just said even the kids because they he was divorced with all of them oh okay yeah he was [Applause] divorced in Michel mulu mesin is as busy as ever dozens of new victims come to see the nurse every day as the gy War brought Ethiopia to the brink of collapse the Waring parties agreed to cease fighting in November 2022 with the withdrawal of soldiers more women are seeking help mvin can't say for certain how many victims there are but
she fears there are hundreds of [Music] thousands the majority of victims don't talk about what happened to them due to the trauma in crimination many women stay silent many have died alone and with no medical care in TIG there's not a single family where a woman wasn't raped and murdered the peace deal marked a dramatic breakthrough the tigan forces agreed to hand over their weapons in return the government and Adis Ababa agreed to establish an interim Regional Administration whether the traumatic events of the the war will ever be adequately addressed is impossible to say what
we know is just the tip of the iceberg the real level of atrocities that happened in this conflict is not really really uh documented and published also what we can learn from Ethiopia is that this uh companies are there for profit and the as far as uh the profits are there they don't care about uh the human cost there have to be some kind of governance both domestic and international governance on their uh on their mode of operation meta does not seem to have taken any major action in response to the tagra case when confronted
by Amnesty International with evidence of having neglected content moderation the company rejected all the findings it countered by insisting that Ethiopia is a high priority country for meta and that it has taken significant measures to delete violating content [Music]
