Facebook removes Ethiopian Prime Minister’s post for promoting violence.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and how the link to the post is now appearing on Facebook

The Ethiopian Prime Minister is the latest African politician whose post has been deleted from a worldwide social media site.

Officials at Facebook, which just relaunched to Meta, decided that one of his recent postings broke the company’s anti-incitement-of-violence policy.

In a Facebook post last Sunday (October 31), Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed urged citizens to pick up guns and protect the nation against a rebel march on Addis Abeba.

The rebel organization is the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has been fighting the federal government for a year.

According to the BBC, the Amharic-language tweet warned that the rebel march was “driving the nation to its doom,” and he asked residents to “organise and march via [any] lawful means with every weapon and force… to block, overturn, and bury the terrorist TPLF.”

According to the BBC, a Facebook spokeswoman said, “We were made aware of a post by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister and deleted it for breaking our policy against inciting and condoning violence.”

“We delete material from people or organisations that violate our Community Standards, regardless of who they are,” says Meta. The parent corporation of Facebook was just renamed ‘Meta.’

In the recent past, Facebook has been chastised for allowing its platform to be used to promote violence in areas of Africa.

It is thought that a flood of reports of the stated post were made by those who classed the material as hate speech, particularly towards ethnic Tigrayans.

Twitter also erased a message by Nigerian President Buhari in June of this year, resulting in a ban on the social media network in Africa’s most populous country.

Buhari recently declared that he has issued instructions to remove the ban, subject to certain criteria that the firm has said it is striving to meet.