Meta Returns to Kenya’s High Court Over Hate Speech in Ethiopia

On Nov. 12, the case brought by two Ethiopian nationals, Abrham Meareg and Fisseha Tekle, and the Katiba Institute against Meta will return to the Kenya’s High Court. The petitioners allege that Meta’s algorithms amplified hateful content in Ethiopia during the Tigray war between 2020 and 2022. Abrham Meareg’s father, Bahir Dar University chemistry professor Meareg Amare, was murdered after a viral Facebook post identified him as Tigrayan and alleged that he had links with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

Facebook users called Meareg a ‘snake’, claiming that he posed a threat to the Amhara community. Some commenters complained that the Facebook posts served to warn Meareg rather than to direct action against him, and urged readers to act with haste. On Nov. 3, 2021, three weeks after the first inciting Facebook post made against him, Meareg was followed home from his university by a group of men and shot dead outside his home. Tekle, an Amnesty International legal adviser, was falsely accused in posts on Facebook of being a TPLF agent and linked to a founder of the party. After the posts went viral, he says he fears for his safety and cannot return to Ethiopia.

Meta tried to stop the case from being heard in Kenya, arguing that because the company is not registered in the country, it cannot be subject to Kenyan law. Meta also invoked the doctrine of constitutional avoidance, arguing that the dispute was contractual, arising from Facebook’s terms of service, and should therefore have been brought before a United States court, as those terms provide. However, the High Court refused to strike down the petition, holding that Facebook’s operation of a content review center in Nairobi when the petition was filed gave Kenyan courts jurisdiction. (Meta told the court that Sama stopped the work in March 2023, three months after Meareg, Tekle and the Katiba Institute filed the petition on Dec. 14, 2022.)

The court further held that the matters raised were substantial, transcended the interests of the parties, and raised questions about the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms in the digital era, and so met the threshold for certification of a bench under Article 165(3)(b) of the Kenyan Constitution. Article 165 (3)(b) of the Kenyan Constitution allows the Kenya High Court jurisdiction to determine the question whether a right or fundamental freedom in the Bill of Rights has been denied, violated, infringed or threatened. On Nov. 12, the Court will listen to Meta’s arguments opposing a recent application by Meareg, Tekle and the Katiba Institute seeking to add new evidence to their petition.

The case returns to court as the fragile Tigray truce established by the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement has collapsed. In Ethiopia, where decades of repression have stifled media freedom, people turn to Facebook for information. Meta itself is aware of this. The Meta-funded Oversight Board, in a policy advisory statement to the company published in a case decision in December 2021, cited expert briefings noting that “Facebook is an important, influential and popular online medium for communication in Ethiopia” and that “there is little to no coverage on the conflict-affected areas in Ethiopian media, and Ethiopians use Facebook to share and receive information about the conflict.”

Nearly a year before war broke out in November 2020, David Kaye, then the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, called on social media companies to establish regular contact with Ethiopian authorities and civil society groups to better understand conditions in the country and establish rapid-reaction channels to enable civil society to report concerning content. However, Facebook prioritized the use of ‘soft actions’ over outright removal of hateful and inciting posts to avoid negatively impacting the corporation’s Meaningful Social Interaction (MSI) metrics that had been introduced by Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to enhance engagement on the platform and thus its profitability.

While Meta has publicly claimed to invest heavily in content moderation including by working with partners with local knowledge and expertise to catch violating content, Ethiopian members of its trusted partner program claimed that the corporation acted complacently when problematic content was reported. One partner reported that Facebook staffers responded that they are not “arbiters of truth.” Just last year, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would get rid of fact checkers in the US so as to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

Meta is being sued in Kenya because Facebook’s content moderation work for Ethiopia was being carried out in Kenya. This work was done through Sama, a business process outsourcing firm providing data labeling, computer vision training, and content moderation services. Sama refers to itself as an “ethical” AI outsourcing company which provides “dignified digital work” to tech laborers. Sama claims to have “helped lift more than 65,000 people out of poverty,” many of whom got their first formal employment contracts from the corporation. However, a 2022 Time magazine investigation revealed “a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize.” Sama content moderators, who Facebook relied on to catch hateful content in Ethiopia, complained of pressure from managers to work fast, with requirements to deal with a ‘ticket’ (flagged item) in as little as 50 seconds or less.

One of the Facebook content moderators interviewed by Time complained that they lived “hand-to-mouth,” that they couldn’t “save a cent” and that the need to take care of their child was the only reason they didn’t resign. Youth unemployment rates in Kenya stand at 67%, forcing thousands to work under poor working conditions for lack of options. The fact that Sama brings desperately needed jobs into the country appears to be why the Kenyan government is quick to take the side of both Sama and Meta over its citizens, despite the complaints of Sama’s workers about poor pay and working conditions.

In March 2024, Kenyan President William Ruto met Nick Clegg, then Meta’s president of global affairs at the State House, and thanked Meta for “offering to consider Kenya for some of the BPOs” (business process outsourcing firms) and offered assurance that he was “reworking the legislation in Kenya” to make it much easier for for firms in that sector to be able to employ young Kenyans. A few months later, in November 2024, Senate Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot proposed the Business Laws Amendment Bill in the Senate, which would remove litigation risk for companies such as Meta when they worked with BPOs in the country. Defending the bill on X, Cheruiyot claimed that the proposed change was a response to “the players in the BPO space. A growing sector that currently employs thousands with the potential to explode and employ millions.” While the bill does not help firms such as Sama by reducing the risk of litigation by workers, it does help them avoid the termination of contracts by corporations such as Facebook once they are embroiled in legal battles. The bill was passed by the Kenyan National Assembly in August this year, and now awaits presidential assent.

Nigerian political analyst Jaye Gaskia argues that remittances from exported labor function as subsidies for a state that has abdicated its developmental responsibilities and uses remittances as a subsidy to its role in citizen welfare and social reproduction. One might argue that a similar logic applies to the Kenyan government’s acquiescence to the wages and working conditions by BPO firms in Kenya. These wages, regardless of the oppressive conditions they are produced under (similar to Gulf remittances, produced under oppressive conditions), subsidize the fiscal recklessness of a ruling class that uses state machinery for self-enrichment and has abandoned it as an object of collective transformation. As Africa is a Country editor William Shoki writes, such states are imaginative on behalf of capital. They imagine foreign investors as their key stakeholders and for their citizens, only acting as an ‘interpreter of necessity’, explaining why they cannot act in line with ways that dignify the lives of their citizens, because otherwise, the foreign capital that subsidizes their abdicated responsibilities would leave.

It remains to be seen how the case by Meareg, Tekle and the Katiba Institute will unfold. One can only hope that a rare instance in which the interests of Africans are upheld will manifest, offering an important lesson to Meta that African states are indeed willing to protect the rights of their citizens and operations on the continent will not be subjugated to corporations’ interests.