A Kenyan court has ruled that Facebook’s owner, Meta, can face a $2.4 billion lawsuit in the East African country for allegedly promoting hate speech which fueled an ethnic war in neighboring Ethiopia, a group that filed the case has announced.
The decision by Kenya’s High Court on Thursday comes more than two years after a group of Ethiopian researchers, along with Kenyan human rights campaigners, launched the lawsuit against the American tech giant.
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The petitioners argue that Facebook’s recommendation algorithm amplified violent posts and contributed to the two-year conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which ended in November 2022. Maereg Amare, a chemistry professor, was killed during the conflict after his home address and posts calling for his murder were published on Facebook, according to his son, Abrham Meareg, one of the plaintiffs.
Fisseha Tekle, a former researcher at Amnesty International and claimant in the case who published reports on crimes committed during the Tigray war, also allegedly received death threats on the Meta platform. The other petitioner is the Katiba Institute (KI), a Kenya-based legal non-profit organization.
The plaintiffs are demanding that Meta hire more content moderators in Africa, with better pay and working conditions, as well as establish a $2.4 billion restitution fund for the victims of hate and violence incited on the platform. The petition also asks the firm to alter its algorithm to stop promoting “viral hate” and formally apologize for the murder of Professor Meareg.
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However, Meta argues that Kenyan courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases against it because it is not registered as a company in the African country.
Similar allegations were leveled against Meta in 2021, when the social media giant was sued for $150 billion for its role in inciting violence in Myanmar, which contributed to the Rohingya genocide.
In a statement on Thursday, the KI said the high court in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, rejected the US-based company’s argument in its latest ruling.
“The ruling shows that the harmful impact of big tech’s discriminatory policies in the African context can be rightfully challenged in our own Kenyan courts,” the institute’s executive director, Nora Mbagathi, stated.
The bloody battle between Tigrayan forces and Ethiopia’s federal government has been named the world’s deadliest conflict in 2022 by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, with over 100,000 people killed. Recent attacks by a faction of the troubled state’s main political party against the interim administration established in 2023 as part of the African Union-mediated Pretoria Agreement that ended the two-year violence have sparked fears of an outbreak of another civil war.