Africa has been a continent exploited since the European scramble carved it out in lines of a draughtsman’s crude design. Its resources have been pilfered; its peoples enslaved for reasons of trade and profit; its political conditions manipulated to favour predatory companies.
A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world. The slavers have replaced their human product with data and information. The ubiquitous sharing of information on social media platforms has brought with it a fair share of dangerous ills. A $2 billion lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, which was filed in Kenya’s High Court this month, is a case in point.
The petitioners, Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle and Abrham Meareg, argue that Meta failed to employ sufficient safety measures on the Facebook platform which would have prevented the incitement of lethal conflict. Most notable were the deaths of Ethiopians arising from the Tigray War, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and seen the displacement of 2.1 million Ethiopians.
Abrham Meareg’s case is particularly harrowing. His father, chemistry Professor Meareg Amare Abrha and an ethnic Tigrayan, was singled out and harassed in a number of violent and racially inflammatory Facebook posts. Two posts screeching with slander (complicity in massacres; aiding military raids, corruption and theft) and death threats found their way onto a page named “BDU STAFF”, which sported over 50,000 followers at the time.
The posts also included the professor’s picture and home locality. Complaints to the platform by his son received no response. The posts remained up for four weeks. Meareg Amare was subsequently assassinated after leaving his work at Bahir Dar University. According to his son, the killing “was orchestrated by both state and non-state actors.”
Rosa Curling, Director of the non-profit campaign outfit Foxglove, an organisation supporting the petitioners, is convinced that the professor would still be alive had the posts been removed. She also makes a salient point. “Sadly, ‘engaging’ posts are often violent or shocking, because people react to them, share them, comment on them. All those reactions mean the Facebook algorithm promotes the post more, and can make hate posts and violence go viral, and spread even further.”
Meta, in response, has trotted out the standard, disingenuous deflection, giving us an insight into a parallel universe of compliance. “We have strict rules about what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram,” declared Meta spokesperson Mike DelMoro. “Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our security and integrity work in Ethiopia.”
Meta’s content moderation hub for Eastern and Southern Africa is located in Nairobi. But questions have been raised about how adequate its staffing and resourcing arrangements are. DelMoro claims there is nothing of interest on that score. “We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise, and continue to develop our skills to detect harmful content in the country’s most commonly spoken languages, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya.”
The treatment of staff at Meta’s main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, Sama, is also the subject of another lawsuit. That action alleges the use of forced labour and human trafficking, unequal labour relations, attacks on unions and a failure to provide sufficient mental health and psychosocial support to hired moderators.
Abrham Meareg and his fellow petitioners are demanding, along with Facebook’s halting of viral hate and demoting of content inciting violence, the employment of greater numbers of content moderators versed in a range of languages. The legal filing also demands that Meta issue an apology for the professor’s death and establish a restitution fund for victims of hate speech or misinformation posted on the company’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Such actions are becoming regular fare. All tend to follow a similar blueprint. In December last year, a class action complaint was lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco claiming that Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.” The language proved instructive: a company, operating much in the traditional mercantilist mould, a plunderer of resources, its gold the product of surveillance capitalism.
Lawyers representing the petitioners also submitted a letter to Facebook’s UK office stating that their clients had been subjected to acts of “serious violence, murder and/or other grave human rights abuses” as part of a genocidal campaign waged by the military regime and aligned extremists in Myanmar.
As with the case lodged in Kenyan High Court, the grounds against Facebook were that its algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya populace; it failed to adequately invest in local moderators and diligent fact-checkers; it failed to remove posts inciting violence against the Rohingya; and it did not shut down or delete specific accounts, groups and pages that encouraged ethnic violence.
Despite such actions, there is nothing in the way Meta operates to suggest a change in approach. As far long as the wallets stretch, platforms such as Facebook will continue to use devilish algorithms to boost bad behaviour. In the scheme of things, such behaviour, however hateful or misinformed, sells. The dragon of surveillance capitalism continues to thrive with fire breathing menace.
[textblock style=”7″]
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
[/textblock]
Electronc loudmouths are more injurious, infectious, dangerous, than ever, spreading filth with ultra modern certainty. I get banned, and may be again, for stating that many in politics, corporations, military, etc., are executive murderers and thieves, as their policies, actions, orders, whims and wishes go out uncaringly, often on a vast profiteering scale. Hateful…
Indeed Phil Pryor.
And what to do about the ‘mercantilist mould’ and ‘surveillance capitalism’? To me they are sophisticated euphemistic titles, a word-washing set to drive discussions from real purpose, from real cause and effect, towards symbolic idealogical discourse on the vicissitudes of markets, commerce and politics.
Many high-minded marketeers and politicians and their flunky scientists and academics, not wishing to be known as weaponizers and trigger pullers, seem at any cost to alienate themselves from terms such as envy and jealousy, enmity, domination, greed, brainwashing, mind control, class war, industrialised murder, pillage, pollution, destruction and extinction. Their duty as toads to tact and diplomacy requires that they remain subjective and inured by hubris. Oh, no! They would have it that those terms are the lingua franca of the uninformed, the wrong-thinking unfortunates, those who’s choices immerse them in battles of their own making.
Given that secrecy and conspiracy are mutualities in the quest for limitless profit and dominion, and divisiveness the m.o., the on-ground experience of the ‘unfortunates’ and their lingua franca in the face of bullshit, provides cover for a convenient and divisive branding of them as haters. Being left alone, or their lot improved, most would not waste effort to be haters, it is the impositions of dominion and divisiveness that drives stridency. Being denied access to the fortunate, they can only flee, be destroyed or destroy and scream out. Being forced by the impasses under the determinism of the fortunates, like all executives or executioners they feel duty-bound to somehow act.
I see them, I hear them and understand them because of their language, it goes to reality. In the face of the artifice of the fortunate, the obsequious and sanctimonious, I’d rather be banned or damned, than turn away from or ignore dark art or any art, for I am not an innocent bystander, and as such am bound to make choices.
Clakka, and others, In Ukraine, Russia “admits” to over five thousand killed, and, Ukraine must have lost up to three of more times that, especially civilians. And peo-ple who never hurt anyone personally, wouldn’t touch a fly, preside over political positions, corporate systems, military and policing roles, financial impelling and support, all contrive to produce “defence” weapons, only for “good use” and rules based law enforcement. Whose rules? How are coffin makers going, and who will bury them when they join the victims, all of us, after a nuclear wipeout? Where are the saintly figures of peace, of discussion, of diplomacy? Not in USA or Russia or anywhere, it seems. Meanwhile borders, and people on the wrong side of them, are not being sensibly corrected. We had slaughters because of Lines in the Congo, in Nigeria, in Sudan, Sudetenlands, Alsace Lorraine, Polish corridors.But executive murderers and thieves, dunces and duds, greedy shitheads and larcenous loudmouths, still exult and thrive…
Yes Phil Pryor,
Who to trust? Who to heed?
Mohammed, who knew them well, said to a Bedouin, “Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first.”
For each, Mohammed and the Bedouin, for what purpose, and to what end? The mind boggles.
It’s been going on since the year dot, and seems set to continue.
We cannot know the minds of others.
Yet we can hear the words and observe the actions that follow, do some accounting and perhaps be less boggled.
How to live and take actions within the paradox of orthodoxy?
Could it be to discount nothing, keep eyes and ears open, walk and chew gum?