Abraham Meareg, the son of an Ethiopian academic shot dead after being attacked in Facebook posts, is among those bringing the case against Meta.

They want a $2bn (£1.6bn) fund for victims of hate on Facebook and changes to the platform's algorithm.

Meta said it invested heavily in moderation and tech to remove hate Representatives said hate, speech, and incitement to violence were against the platform's rules.

Our safety-and-integrity work in Ethiopia is guided by feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions, the representative said.

Famine-like conditions

The case, filed in Kenya's High Court, is supported by the campaign group Foxglove.

Meta has a content moderation hub in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the conflict between the Ethiopian government and forces in the northern Tigray region, with 400,000 others living in famine-like conditions including Amharic, promo Somali, and.

It maintains Ethiopia is a high priority - although, less than 10% of the population uses Facebook - and says the steps it has taken include:

reducing posts virility

expanding violence and incitement policies

improving enforcement

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Analysis by Peter Chichewa, BBC Reality Check, Nairobi

This is a significant development, an attempt to legally take to task a social-media company over its actions during the conflict in Ethiopia.

Critics say Meta and other social-media companies do too little to prevent the sharing and spread of disinformation and content promoting hate and incitement against various ethnic groups. And in some cases, it takes too long for content to be removed, mostly after people report it.

Others claim the company has been unfair in its crackdown on hateful content, targeting posts written in some languages disproportional

Meta has always insisted it does an l and has heavily invested in the capacity to catch hateful and inflammatory content in the languages spoken most widely in the country.

It does have content moderators conversant with the main local languages but, also, relies on artificial intelligence and local partners to flag content. And how many moderators work with Meta, focusing on Ethiopia, has never been clear. But this is not the first time Facebook has been accused of doing too little to stop the spread of content promoting ethnic hate and violence in Ethiopia.

In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee, told the US Senate the platform's algorithm was "fanning ethnic violence... picking up the extreme sentiments, the division" as those posts attracted high engagement, while Facebook could not adequately identify dangerous content, and lacked sufficient expertise in many local languages - including some spoken in Ethiopia.

Other plaintiffs in the case include the Katina Institute and Fish Take, who alleges Facebook's moderation failures made his human-rights reporting on the conflict, for Amnesty International, impossible - and risked his family's lives.

They are asking the court to order Facebook to take steps to remedy the situation, including:

creating a restitution fund of about 200bn Kenyan shillings (who) ($1.6bn) for victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook and a further 50bn for similar harm from sponsored posts

preventing its algorithm from recommending "incited, hateful, and dangerous content"

employing enough moderators to translate local content, ensuring equity between the moderation in Nairobi and the user