Facebook depends on local partners to flag hateful content. In Ethiopia, those partners say they were ignored.
supporting or praising the OLA's violent activities.
As of April 5, around 70% of the links the Network Against Hate Speech reported in October are still active. At least seven posts that the network submitted, which were reviewed by Insider, contained videos showing young children with AK-47s and handguns and appeared to glorify the use of child soldiers. Many of these videos first appeared on the platform in January last year, and were still up as late as the end of February.
For the trusted partners in Ethiopia who had signed on to work with Facebook at a time of acute crisis in their country, the long response times and the pushback they often got was demoralizing. After Professor Amare was killed, the trusted partner who said he flagged the posts was plagued by guilt and left wondering if there was any point to his working with Facebook. "When I saw that he was dead, I was really angry," the partner said.
The partners said that Meta would frequently disagree with their assessments of what constituted a serious and actionable violation of Meta's policies. Just 10 percent of Facebook's revenue comes from Rest of World, the accounting term used for countries outside of North America and Western Europe, which includes Ethiopia and dozens of other countries in the global south. In tech speak, Ethiopia is a low average-revenue-per-user country.
But a system for catching hate speech remains essential, and Copeland said that Meta should redesign the Trusted Partner system with input from its global partners. Some things Abrham knew: Both a devout Christian and a man of science, his father had for years covered school fees and bought school supplies for underprivileged kids in Bahir Dar. He enjoyed traditional Tigrigna music, and on long drives he'd sing along to the music of Yemane Ghebremichael and Tsehaytu Beraki, Eritrean musicians he adored.
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