US tech giant Meta faces legal challenges in Ethiopia and Kenya

US tech giant Meta has faced mounting legal troubles in East Africa, including in Ethiopia where its subsidiary Facebook has been accused of contributing to violence during the brutal two-year conflict in the country’s northern Tigray region, and in Kenya where Meta has reportedly faced several lawsuits by local Facebook content moderators.
In Ethiopia, Many in Ethiopia have criticized Facebook for its alleged role in promoting hate speech during the conflict in Tigray. The tech giant has been accused by rights group Amnesty International of using social media site’s algorithms that “supercharged the spread of harmful rhetoric”. According to Amnesty’s report, Facebook had failed to take adequate steps to curb the spread of such rhetoric, an accusation that Facebook’s parent company Meta has previously denied. An investigation tracked down relatives, who have linked Facebook posts to the killing of loved ones. The issue is of crucial importance, as social networks are used by millions of Ethiopians every day and influence the inter-ethnic conflicts that plague the East African nation. The Amnesty report also said Meta’s “data-hungry business model” continued to pose “significant dangers” to human rights in conflict-hit areas.
Meanwhile, while a Kenyan judge ruled in December last year that Meta is not in contempt of court for failing to pay dozens of Facebook content moderators, who had been laid off by a contractor, Meta reportedly faces at least two more lawsuits in the East African country. Another former content moderator is suing Sama and Facebook in Kenya for a raft of alleged rights violations, including exploitation and union-busting. In the lawsuit lodged in 2022, the content moderator claims he was paid as little as $2.20 an hour to view posts that included beheadings and child abuse, affecting his long-term mental health. And it was also a local Kenyan NGO has lodged a $1.6 billion lawsuit alongside two Ethiopian citizens, in which it accuses the US tech giant of inflaming the civil war Ethiopia’s Tigray due to its alleged failure to remove hate speech on Facebook.