His family has no doubt: Facebook helped kill chemistry professor Meareg Amare.

“The posts on that platform destroyed the reputation my father built over 40 years,” said his son, Abrham Meareg.

In October 2021, as Ethiopia’s brutal civil war in the northern Tigray region neared its first anniversary, a Facebook account with more than 50,000 followers posted death threats against the 60-year-old professor. The account accused him of being an agent of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which was fighting the federal government. His only “crime,” the family said, was his Tigrayan ethnicity.

“My father wasn’t a politician or a soldier. He refused to leave Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara region,” Abrham said. “He didn’t even have a Facebook account. Neighbors were the ones who warned him.”

A month later, Meareg was gunned down in front of his home. The attackers had also shared his address online.

Devastated, Abrham joined Fisseha Tekle, a Tigrayan researcher for Amnesty International who was also targeted during the conflict, and the Kenya-based NGO Katiba Institute in filing a lawsuit against Meta in December 2022. They accused the tech giant of promoting content that fueled ethnic violence. On April 3, Kenya’s High Court in Nairobi ruled it has jurisdiction to hear the case.

‘A dangerous algorithm’

“I hope this won’t be the last case,” said Mebrihi Brhane, a lawyer and vice president of Ethiopian human rights group Human Rights First. “Hate speech is everywhere in Ethiopia. During the war, politicians used Facebook to call for Tigrayans to be put in concentration camps.”

A former content moderator for Meta’s East Africa team, based in Kenya during the war, confirmed systemic failures in how the company handled such content. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she recalled removing several posts inciting violence against Meareg—but many others remained online.

“Meta’s policies were vague and didn’t allow us to consistently remove hate speech,” she said. “I felt powerless. In countries like Ethiopia, where many people believe what they read on social media, it’s urgent to create a safer online space.”

The plaintiffs also challenged the algorithm at the heart of Facebook’s platform.

“The system is designed to maximize engagement. And hateful content drives engagement,” said Tom Hegarty, spokesperson for the London-based law firm Foxglove, which is representing the plaintiffs. “That’s a failure by Facebook, which ends up amplifying dangerous content.”

The lawsuit called for the creation of a $2.5 billion compensation fund for victims of hate on Facebook. But for Meareg, what matters most is forcing Meta to change what he calls its “incendiary algorithm” to prevent more tragedies.

A trial date has yet to be set.