Ethiopian NGOs Say Facebook Ignored Warnings About Hate Speech

The Takeaway

WNYC and PRX

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4.6 • 716 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

A new investigation by Insider reveals flaws and failures of Facebook’s "Trusted Partner" program, which it heavily relies on in "Rest of World" regions which account for just 10% of Facebook's revenue. Trusted Partners are local NGOs contracted to provide local expertise and context to inform Facebook’s content moderation policies and practices. But Trusted Partners in Ethiopia told Insider that Facebook routinely ignored their recommendations and allowed hate speech that inflamed real life violence. We speak with Tekendra Parmar, Tech Features Editor at Insider, who led the investigation. Later we hear from Abrham Amare, whose father, Professor Meareg Amare, was murdered after Facebook posts calling for violence against him went viral. Amare and others filed a landmark lawsuit against Facebook last year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Latif from Radio Lab.
0:02.0	Our goal with each episode is to make you think,
0:06.0	how did I live this long and not know that?
0:09.0	Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.
0:13.0	Listen, wherever you get podcasts.
0:20.0	For the past several months, the Ethiopian government and opposition militias have been negotiating terms of a peace deal.
0:29.7	The deadly civil war came to an official end in November of last year.
0:35.5	But not before it claimed more than 600,000 lives
0:39.3	and forced more than 5 million people to flee their homes.
0:44.3	Hospitals still need medicine.
0:46.3	People still need food.
0:47.3	They need water.
0:48.3	So the needs remain extremely high.
0:51.3	In the wake of the violence and loss, many Ethiopians have called for accountability.
0:59.0	From Facebook, they are saying that hate speech and calls for violence that circulated on the
1:04.0	platform inflamed the conflict. Now or never to act on that platform to reconsider its conduct, and especially in that of the content moderators.
1:16.5	Even though it will not bring our happiness back, at least it will try to heal some of the damage that were experiencing.
1:26.4	That's Abraham Amari, one of the people who filed a landmark lawsuit against Meta,
1:32.5	Facebook's parent company back in December.
1:35.1	Now, we're going to hear more from Abraham later in the show.
1:38.4	But at first, we're going to talk about a recent investigation by Insider that gives some insight
1:43.3	into how Facebook's content moderation
	...

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