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| Ethiopia PM Abiy Ahmed and how the link to the post now appears on Facebook |
ADDIS ABABA, Nov 4 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Ethiopian Prime Minister has become the latest African leader to have his post removed from a global social media platform.
Officials from Facebook which recently rebranded to Meta, ruled that one of his recent posts violated its policies against inciting violence.
PM Abiy Ahmed in a post last Sunday (October 31) exhorted the citizenry to take up arms and defend the country from a rebel march on the capital, Addis Ababa.
The rebel group is the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has been engaged in a year-long campaign against the federal government.
According to the BBC, the post which was in Amharic stated among other things, that the rebel march was “pushing the country to its demise,” and he urged citizens to “organise and march through [any] legal manner with every weapon and power… to prevent, reverse and bury the terrorist TPLF.”
The BBC quotes a Facebook spokesperson as saying: “We were made aware of a post by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister and removed this for violating our policies against inciting and supporting violence.
“At Meta, we remove content from individuals or organizations that violates our Community Standards, no matter who they are.” Facebook’s parent company was recently branded ‘Meta.’
Facebook has in recent past been criticised for allowing its platform to be used to incite violence in parts of the continent.
It is believed that there was a flood of reporting of the said post by persons who classified the content as hate speech, especially against ethnic Tigrayans.
In June this year, Twitter also deleted a post by Nigerian President Buhari, which incident triggered a ban of the social media platform in Africa’s most populous nation.
Buhari recently announced that he had given orders for the ban to be lifted subject to certain conditions which the company has said it is working to satisfy. — NNN-AGENCIES