The Ethiopia-Tigray war that began in 2020 left a trail of destruction. Mainstream media organizations like CNN, and BBC among others covered the war, uncovering the atrocities committed against Tigrayans. The revelations led to coordinated social media campaigns to smear the media organizations. This investigation looks into the impact these messages had on journalists and fact-checkers who covered the war.
In the social media era, one can send and receive information from any part of the world at the click of a button. However, it is a double-edged sword that could also be used to spread disinformation and misinformation. Ethiopia was forced to take the bad with the good that came with social media during the war between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Piga Firimbi reached out to Ethiopian journalist and fact-checker Hagos Gebreamlak of Inform Africa who spoke on the role of social media during this period.
“It had a negative impact,” Hagos said, “It was mostly used to disseminate propaganda to unleash psychological warfare. On the other hand, it was used positively to circulate information so that people could take measures beforehand. For example, to evacuate areas where the war was looming.”
Hagos Gebreamlak, Inform Africa
There are two narratives at play across various social media platforms. One based on claims against the Ethiopian government’s atrocities in Tigray as published by CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc. The other, by Russia’s RT News and other social media accounts painting TPLF as the aggressor-in-chief and foreign media as false.
The conflict with TPLF started after Ethiopia and Eritrea had just ended their two-decade-long war. November 4, 2020, marked the beginning of the conflict when Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered an attack on Tigrayan regional forces. This was in response to an attack on a military base housing Ethiopian troops, besmirching Prime Minister Abiy’s reputation as a 2019 Nobel Laureate. Abiy also made history when he became the first Prime Minister from the Oromo tribe who make up 34% of Ethiopia’s population.
Abiy created a new national party; the Prosperity Party, comprising three of the four ethnically based parties. The fourth party, the TPLF, declined to join the coalition, claiming that Abiy was undermining their legacy and that the prime minister intended to sacrifice the regions at the altar of boosting the government’s power in Addis Ababa. On November 4, 2020, TPLF attacked the Ethiopian National Defense Forces base in Tigray. Reacting to the attack, Abiy ordered a “military response” and it all went south from there.
Months into the war, on April 2021, CNN published a piece uncovering evidence of torture, mass detention, and execution by the Ethiopian forces on Tigrayans. The story showed mutilated bodies washed up along river banks in Sudan. However, the Ethiopian Government dismissed the CNN report, citing inconsistencies. On October 17, 2022, another report by BBC Africa Eye titled ‘Tigray Under Siege’ showed the post-war suffering of Tigrayans. Some survivors also narrate what they went through at the hands of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops. Several human rights organisations accused Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers of committing atrocities in Ethiopia, but the Ethiopian government strongly refuted the accusations leveled against them terming them as unsubstantiated evidence intended to “fuel ethnic conflict”.
Piga Firimbi also spoke to Ethiopian-Canadian freelance journalist Samuel Getachew who said journalists who covered the war only gave one-sided accounts thus Ethiopians did not think the reports were objective enough. The country was divided with Samuel adding that the answer to the question of whether or not there was a genocide depends on who you ask.
Coordinated Campaigns- Denial of atrocities reported
Between September 5, 2020, to September 9, 2020, tweets with the same wording but shared from different accounts were claiming that the CNN report was fictitious. This is despite the report containing evidence of torture and targeted killings in Tigray.
“Let it be known by all @CNN is writing a false report on Ethiopia as it was doing for years now with an alleged and fictitious narrative of Genocide being committed by GoE,” the captions read. Attached to some posts is a video of Trump refusing to take questions from a CNN reporter in 2018 after calling them ‘fake news’. See image below;
The first post was shared by this account which identifies as Ustath Jemal Beshir Ahmed on September 5, 2022. It had over 1,369 likes and retweets at the time this article went to publish. The post aims to delegitimize CNN’s reports in Ethiopia whilst absolving the Ethiopian Government of atrocities in the conflict.
On November 5, 2021, tweets discrediting the CNN report and other media houses that reported the same contained the hashtags:
#CNNFakeNews #CNNFakereport #NomoreTPLF #NoMore #BBCFakenews #ReutersFakeNews #DisarmTPLF #CNNLies #HandsoffEthiopia
On Facebook, these were the hashtags used: #HandsoffEthiopia #EthiopiaShallPrevail #tplfisaterrorist #BBCFakeNews #Ikomemarcus (An Ethiopian Influencer at the forefront of this campaign) #nomore #TPLFTerroristGroup #TPLFisthecause #CNNsupportingterrorism
These claims are the polar opposite of reports accusing both sides of the conflict of crimes against humanity. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken termed the violence committed by Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) as “ethnic cleansing” in a speech to Congress on March 10, 2021.
Furthermore, separate investigations carried out by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International discovered elements of ethnic cleansing committed by the ENDF and affiliated forces in Western Tigray. They are contained in a report titled We Will Erase You From This Land published on April 6, 2022. It reported widespread violence against Tigrayans in Western Tigray in the wake of a violent attack by Tigrayan militia on Amhara civilians in Mai Kadra on November 9, 2020, what followed was more than a year of targeted killings and expulsion.
More recently in January 2023, Africa Union’s lead mediator in the conflict Olusegun Obasanjo estimates that as many as 600,000 lives might have been lost in the conflict since it began in November 2020. Adding that the peace agreement between the TPLF and Ethiopian Government signed in Pretoria on November 2, 2022, stopped “1000 deaths every day.”
Other instances of coordinated behavior on Twitter are captured here, here, here, and here.
On November 5, 2021, Ethiopian TV personality and tech consultant Solomon Kassa, shared a post on Facebook bearing the hashtags listed above. 36 more posts with the same pictures were posted on the same day. The posts also have the same caption, from the words used to the emojis used.
More coordinated activity on Facebook from accounts rejecting the CNN report here, here, and here.
The posts in the image below contain the same captions as the hashtags #CNNFakeNews and #BBCFakeNews. The pages accuse CNN of “Supporting the destruction of culture” in Ethiopia.
These posts feature images taken at a protest with demonstrators holding up placards condemning BBC News and western media for accusing ENDF of atrocities committed in Tigray. All the posts are from different accounts but bear the same captions and images.
The Impact
The disparaging remarks about CNN on Facebook and Twitter could harm the multinational news channel. It could lose credibility in the eyes of some neutral viewers.
Every war has casualties and according to accounts from CNN, people are dying of hunger, hospitals are running low on supplies, people have lost their kin and many others displaced. If all these claims are repeatedly rubbished as fake, people might not get the help they need as the credibility of these people’s suffering has been questioned.
This also subjects journalists from these organisations to bullying and casts doubt on their professionalism. Nima Elbagir and Larry Madowo are some of the journalists that have experienced this. Samuel and his colleagues even fled to Nairobi, Kenya, after they were labeled as traitors and had their licenses revoked by the Ethiopian government.
“Personally, I had no license to be a journalist in Ethiopia which the constitution of the country or the law of the country does require me to. They released a statement that made me prone to any kind of attack and I left. Many of my colleagues stayed in Nairobi for a while.”
Samuel Getachew, freelance journalist.
This is a tactic that appears to have been repeatedly deployed by the Ethiopian government, in efforts to stifle critical independent journalism at the height of the conflict. License revocations were also issued to The Economist’s Horn of Africa correspondent, Tom Gardner, and independent journalist Lucy Kassa who extensively reported on atrocities committed by both sides.
“To our disappointment, you have failed to live up to these standards of conduct for journalists,” reads a letter by the Ethiopian media Authority (EMA) addressing Tom Gardner, “Despite our repeated discussions, verbal warnings and written reprimands, you have not shown the willingness to correct your mistaken approach.”
See screen grab below.
Tom was given 48 hours to leave the country.
EMA also tweeted stating that Samuel Getachew and freelance journalist Lucy Kassa were never recognized as accredited journalists, claiming that it “Does not recognize the individual as a registered journalist under Ethiopian laws”. Resultantly exposing both journalists to online attacks that eventually led to them fleeing Ethiopia.
See screengrab below;
In addition to the online attacks by both sides due to her fearless reporting, on February 8, 2021, Lucy Kassa was ‘visited’ by government agents who threatened to kill her for her investigative work on war crimes committed by Eritrean forces allied to the ENDF. “I was doing a report about a 27-year-old mother who was gang-raped by 15 Eritrean troops, held in a military camp, tortured together with hundreds of other sexually enslaved women,” Lucy narrated, “Then I was forced into exile.”
Despite her reports on widespread sexual violence and torture being corroborated by independent investigations including the Human Rights Watch report, Lucy remains in exile.
Kirubel Tesfaye, a fact-checker at Haq Check also spoke to Piga Firimbi and revealed that the bullies also went after fact-checkers, who were unbiased in debunking claims from the warring factions.
“We have been bullied by both sides on social media, especially Twitter. There is no legal framework to protect fact-checkers in Ethiopia and the proclamation on hate speech is also not applied.”
Kirubel Tesfaye, Haq Check
Despite the ongoing truce between TPLF and the Ethiopian government, reports of sustained violence and ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans persist in Ethiopia. Online disinformation is still rife with opposing narratives battling it out on social media for the position of truth. As the phrase goes, ‘The first casualty of war is the truth’.
This article was produced with mentorship from the African Academy for Open Source Investigations (AAOSI), to tackle disinformation that undermines our democracies, as part of an initiative by the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) and Code for Africa (CfA). Visit disinfo.africa for more information.
The article was also made possible with research by Thomas Mukhwana, and reviewed by Piga Firimbi Editor Linda Ngari.
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