There’s Such Thing As A Dragon:
The Human Cost of Social Media in Poor Countries.
On October 30, 2020, Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology sat down with Joe Rogan to discuss the effects of social media on individual, societal and country level. I was alarmed by the repeated mention of my birth country, Ethiopia. A nation of over 110 million people, he said, was one out of many developing countries at an alarming risk of violence that can be fueled by the use of social media such as Facebook.
To my and so many other’s dismay, we found our promising country in total turmoil four days after this podcast was aired. The conflict since has became a cause for thousands of senseless deaths, displacement, destruction of properties, and an all around gruesome war crimes. Abiy Ahmed Ali’s, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, declaration of war on his political rivals in the north was preceded by one crucial fact that continues to define this conflict. His government made sure to cut the region and its over 6 million people off from all communications. The first to go? You guessed it — the internet.
For the war on Tigray, world class weapons were used. But deadlier than those weapons were the misinformation and hate speeches that flooded and continue to flood through social media. With no official media to contend its narratives, the federal government continued to deny the war crimes, a looming famine that eventually reached phase 5, and refusing to give access to humanitarian corridors — endangering the lives of so many. For months, its official accounts threw fit at the suggestion that Eritrean government, a long time enemy of the state, was involved in this war — worse yet, denying and eventually down playing the gruesome war crimes the government of Eritrea is committing on the people of Tigray.
Ethiopian and Eritrean government’s plan to exterminate an entire ethnic group, Tigrayans, in the dark fall short when families and friends of Tigrayans, journalists, political analysts around the world committed to a year long sleepless nights to raising awareness of the crimes.
Those voices were loud. They were constant. They were dedicated. They were knocking at every door, marching on the streets of Europe and the United states, leaving no stone unturned until the world heard the suffering of their families — until the world acted. Their times spent on social media or elsewhere wasn’t paid in cash — their payment was a hope for justice. The desire was to see their people freed & fed. To every misinformation the governments spread, thousands of “voices” tried to rebuke those lies and stood guard to their truth.
Unable to fully implement its well planned misinformation nor win the war on the ground, the government of Ethiopia called on its citizens to do better. On multiple occasions, the PM accused all tigrayans of being secret agents. His messages were amplified a thousand times more by his followers. Every Tigrayan was a target each day that passed. Post after post, were being release with no-one to actively regulate them. The conflict, which is now 366 days old, has continued to be characterized by folks who have taken to social media, mostly to the three social media giants, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to call harm on their fellow Ethiopians.
To help with the misinformation and propaganda campaign, Ethiopian government seems to have extended its telecom service to its partner in crime, Eritrea. A simple look up of areas the only Telecommunication provider in Ethiopia services, reveals that Eritrea is an active user of the Ethiopia’s Network service. Tweets with hashtags that promoted the Ethiopian government propaganda coming out of Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa, amounted to only 0.2% while Eritrea, a small country of not more that 6 million** is popping out 0.8% of the tweets coming out of that region. “The Key to victory in military science is information & propaganda” said the PM in one of his most recent and rare, address to parliament. He concluded by promising to do more of that.
When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen re-alerted the world of the social media giant’s irresponsible handling of information and skewed algorithms, American congress acted. Her testimonial on how Facebook is fanning the war in Ethiopia however, made little headlines, but — what is worse - solicited little action from this media power house.
YouTube has been getting constant alerts from activists about channels, such as ESAT, that consistently call on harm on this minority ethnic group. Reporting and re-reporting of these channels seems to keep on falling on deaf ears.
On June, 2021, eager advocates noticed what seemed to be a reference to Ethiopia form Twitter’s CEO, Jack. #eth he posted. That was it. Eight months into a war that claimed so many lives, all he could alter was a three-letter hashtag that actually had nothing to do with the alarming political situation of the country. Before then and since then, Twitter has done very little to de-platform hate speeches that were being fired on million of innocent civilians.
Who remembers the children’s book, “There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon”? Billy tried to inform his mother about a tiny dragon in his bedroom. His mom kept on telling him, “There’s no such thing as a dragon!” Which only made the dragon get bigger and bigger. He grew, and grew, and grew, until he was bigger than Billy’s house” — and ended up uprooting their entire house. Billy and his family eventually managed to get the dragon back to its tiny cute state. All that was needed was for the mother to acknowledge its existence. Once it was acknowledge and patted, all was well in Billy’s home again.
I wish the world of politics and imprudent social media algorithms worked like children's books. I wish the moment we realize a mistake, we could do a few arm flexing to make all of our troubles go away. But I don’t need to be the one to tell you that is not how it works. Social media has been the dragon that has been spitting fire since the war on Tigray began. At the beginning, it was so small and subtile. As days progressed the algorithms started picking on which side each of us belonged. Each post fine-tuned what and who we interacted with. Contents that engaged and enraged us most were placed on top of our feeds — widening our divide even more. The cute little dragon has now grown and the fire it spits is menacing to engulf millions of Tigrayans who are scattered around the country [Ethiopia] — Such is the culmination of irresponsible and artificially engineered social dynamics. Such is the fate of a struggling developing country in the age of social networking.
