We call on the international community to urgently act to stop the looming war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and work to help uphold the precarious and imperfect Pretoria peace deal that ended the 2020-2022 Tigray war. It is the responsibility of regional bodies like the African Union and multilateral institutions like the United Nations to de-escalate current tensions and avoid a regional war. Social media companies in particular should be pressured to curb the violent speech and warmongering that is spreading unchecked on their platforms.
For the last 3 years, we have been researching and documenting the role of social media platforms in exacerbating the 2020-2022 Tigray war. We performed computational analyses to quantify the level of hate speech on these platforms, and interviewed content moderators to better understand the organizational practices that have resulted in the platforms’ failures to adequately curb genocidal language. These platforms pledged to do better following the revelation that they promoted violence that incited genocide against the Rohingya in 2016. Facebook claimed to do “longstanging work to protect people in Ethiopia” when confronted with its moderation failures during the 2020-2022 Tigray war which resulted in the genocide of Tigrayans. But we are seeing an acceleration of the same type of warmongering on social media platforms that we documented at the beginning of the catastrophic Tigray war in 2020.
It's not enough to perform a postmortem analysis after millions have been killed, maimed, or displaced, and merely promise to do better without delivering on that promise. Social media platforms need to proactively curb warmongering and hateful content that is spreading unchecked on their platforms and exacerbating multiple wars and genocides around the world. Failure to quickly remove such types of posts has resulted in murders orchestrated on these platforms, like the killing of Professor Meareg Amare after Facebook failed to remove a post that branded him a traitor and called for him to be killed. On the heels of a two billion dollar lawsuit the platform is facing for its role in this murder, Facebook is still spreading clear calls for violence. For example, a recent video by a known Eritrean government supporter threatening to soon “turn Tigray into dust” has been watched 251,000 times at the time of this writing.
This spread of violent language is not unique to Facebook. Clear calls for mass violence and warmongering on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube are exponentially growing with no signs of action by these companies. Supporters and opponents of both the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have spent months antagonizing each other on these platforms, threatening to destroy each other on the battlefield, promoting the recruitment of fighters, and demonizing enemy factions. Renowned Ethiopian government-backed activists with hundreds of thousands of followers have flooded these platforms with clear calls for all-out war against Eritrea and the annexation of its territory.
The people of Ethiopia and Eritrea deserve peace, not never-ending wars resulting in records shattered for the most number of casualties in a war in the 21st century, the longest continuous recorded internet shutdown in history, and one of the worst sieges in recorded history. The international community failed to stop the last full-scale war in the region. It has a responsibility to stop this war which risks bringing more catastrophe than the last Tigray war. Multilateral organizations need to act now to pressure all parties to resolve these tensions through dialogue. And social media platforms have a responsibility to curb the violent language setting the stage for war before it's too late. We can't say that we did not know. We are ringing the alarm bells for what is to come and urge you to act with us.