An illustration of Professor Meareg Amare, whose killing in Bahir Dar in November 2021 is at the center of the case against Meta in Kenya. Credit: Illustration by Alina Pechenckina for Amnesty International (CC BY 4.0), as used by Tech Policy Press.
Meta returns to Kenya’s High Court on Thursday to oppose a bid to add new evidence in a case alleging Facebook amplified hate that contributed to the 2021 killing of a Tigrayan professor.
The petitioners are Abrham Meareg, whose father, Professor Meareg Amare of Bahir Dar University, was shot dead outside his home on November 3, 2021, and Fisseha Tekle, a legal adviser at Amnesty International who says Facebook posts falsely accused him of working for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Kenya’s Katiba Institute is a co petitioner. They filed the case on December 14, 2022.
They allege that Meta’s algorithms amplified hateful and inciting content during the war in northern Ethiopia, and that Facebook failed to remove posts that identified Meareg as a Tigrayan and linked him to the TPLF about three weeks before he was killed.
Meta argued that the Kenyan court had no jurisdiction over a case about Ethiopia. The High Court did not accept that, and ruled that the moderation work done in Nairobi by the outsourcing firm Sama gave it jurisdiction. Meta told the court that Sama ended that work in March 2023. Katiba said the case was allowed to proceed on April 3, 2025.
Tech Policy Press reported that on Thursday the court will hear Meta’s arguments against an application by the petitioners to add new evidence to the case. Mereja Media could not confirm the hearing time. Meta has said publicly that it invests heavily in content moderation, and the allegations in the petition have not been decided by the court.
The case is one of the few legal attempts to hold a major platform responsible for harm linked to the Tigray war, and it comes as hate speech online around the conflicts in Amhara and Tigray remains a concern for rights groups.
Sources
- Tech Policy Press, Meta returns to Kenya’s High Court over hate speech in Ethiopia
- Katiba Institute, Court gives go ahead for landmark case to stop Facebook spreading murder and death threats online
- Amnesty International, Kenya: High Court to decide jurisdiction of landmark Meta case
- Kenya Law, Meareg and others v Meta Platforms, High Court ruling of April 3, 2025