Social Media Platforms Are Spreading Violent Warmongering Content Encouraging All-Out War Between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Again

A statement from @DAIR at https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/tigray-social/

"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....

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 Ethiopians (wisely), appear to not have built any cities or towns on top of the volcano.

Oooh, that's a big volcano. #MountFentale #Ethiopia

Interesting, they have been having an earthquake swarm near a volcano there, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%9325_Ethiopian_earthquakes

Mahmoud Ahmed is a national icon of Ethiopia, a musician who rose to prominence during the time of Haile Selassie, and whose songs are known by every generation, though he hasn’t released a new track in decades. Now, he’s retiring, and @thecontinent spoke to him days before his final concert in Addis Ababa. Here’s the interview — writer Maya Misikir suggests listening to it accompanied by Ahmed’s most famous track, “Tizita,” (sometimes known as “Tezeta”) which is a song about nostalgia.

https://continent.substack.com/p/i-would-be-happy-to-die-on-that-stage

#Africa #Ethiopia #MahmoudAhmed #Music ##Tezeta #Tizita #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

“In Sudan and Ethiopia, warehouses full of food cannot reach 150,000 starving mothers and children because DOGE stopped the process. It’s hard to fathom how one individual so wealthy that he could feed millions of starving people, is instead bragging about withholding all that food from those who need it in order to survive.”
—Marianne Williamson, How Rich, How Smart, How Brazen They Are
#musk #doge #usa #sudan #ethiopia