In Ethiopia, fact-checking can be a matter of life and death

As reports of drone strikes and fresh clashes between Ethiopian government forces and Tigrayan fighters surfaced in late January, fears of a return to full-scale war spread quickly. Flights to northern Ethiopia were cancelled, and tensions rose ahead of the national elections in June, bringing renewed attention to the role misinformation played during the last conflict. In moments like this, fact-checking in Ethiopia becomes a matter of life and death.

During the country’s northern war, a devastating civil war pitting the federal government against forces from the northern Tigray region that took place from 2020 to 2022, information flow collapsed almost entirely. Internet and phone lines were cut, major roads closed, and independent reporting largely shut out. Even so, images of violence continued to circulate online, often stripped of context and beyond the reach of verification. Ethiopian fact-checkers had to determine whether a single image or video might trigger panic, reprisals or displacement.

Rehobot Ayalew, then the lead fact-checker at HaqCheck, an International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) verified fact-checking organisation, said the work narrowed to image and video verification. 

“That was all we had.”

In a country where a single lie can ignite violence, fact-checking is a high-stakes effort with real-life consequences. Ayalew recalled how one false rumour about a rebel advance emptied an entire community. 

“Most people fled their homes,” she said, “and struggled for months, even though everything was actually fine.”

In a nation of over 130 million, Ayalew estimated that she was one of fewer than ten full-time practitioners.

The conflict began in November 2020, when fighting broke out between the federal government and forces in the northern Tigray region. It killed hundreds of thousands, triggered a severe humanitarian crisis, and involved reported atrocities by all sides. Although a ceasefire was agreed in November 2022, the peace is fraying. The latest reports of renewed fighting have revived concerns that the information vacuum that defined the war years could re-emerge just as quickly as the violence itself.

During the 2020-2022 war, Ayalew and her small team, working from Addis Ababa, monitored a daily flood of social media claims whenever fighting flared. Verification depended on reverse image searches, metadata analysis and sporadic contact with sources when communication was possible. 

Much of what they assessed was images and videos capable of inflaming ethnic tensions. These included recycled footage from other conflicts, fabricated territorial gains and propaganda designed to provoke fear. 

One widely cited case involved a university professor whose ethnic background was falsely portrayed on Facebook as proof of political allegiance. Hate-filled posts followed. He was later killed outside his home, and his family sued Meta for failing to act despite repeated warnings.

“Fake information has claimed the lives of many Ethiopians,” said Ermias Mulugeta, a research editor at Inform Africa, the organisation behind HaqCheck, and former editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Addis Maleda. 

“That is why fact-checking is crucial here.”

Muthoki Mumo, Africa Program Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Ethiopia has become “one of the most difficult places for independent journalism in Africa,” particularly for reporters covering conflict or politically sensitive issues. Independent reporting, she said, is increasingly treated “as a criminal act rather than a public service.”

Recent incidents underscore how tightly access can be controlled. In February, the Ethiopian Media Authority declined to renew the accreditation of three Reuters journalists and revoked the agency’s credentials to cover the African Union summit, a move that came days after the publication of an investigative report on Ethiopia’s alleged role in Sudan’s conflict. In a separate incident, an AFP journalist was blocked from boarding a flight to Tigray, where fresh clashes had been reported.

As independent reporting shrank between 2020 and 2022, false content flourished. Ayalew spent much of her time debunking recycled visuals – old videos falsely presented as current military operations, misattributed images claiming to show drone attacks, and years-old photos reused to exaggerate battlefield gains. 

The challenge of reach

Only about 21 per cent of Ethiopia’s population has internet access, concentrated in urban areas. Yet rumours travel far through word of mouth. 

“What circulates on social media actually reaches even the rural areas that don’t have access,” Ayalew said. 

In rural Ethiopia, information flows through village elders, religious leaders, and community gatherings. A false claim posted on Facebook in Addis Ababa can be repeated in a village square hundreds of miles away within days, transformed through each retelling. 

This created a paradox. Those most exposed to misinformation were least likely to see a correction. HaqCheck’s online fact-checks in English and Amharic mainly reached an urban, educated, already sceptical audience. 

“They were not the ones being misinformed in the first place,” Ayalew said.

In highly polarised environments, corrections do not always settle disputes. When fact-checkers challenged claims from one side of the conflict, supporters often interpreted the intervention as biased. 

“I’m questioning whether fact-checking alone really minimises harm in our context,” Ayalew said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re working in a vacuum.”

A brief window, then collapse

After Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, Ethiopia’s media experienced a brief “honeymoon time,” Mulugeta said, with improved press freedom. The change followed years of political repression under his predecessors, Meles Zenawi and Hailemariam Desalegn, both of whose regimes were accused of suppressing civil liberties, jailing political opponents and journalists, and using anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent.

Ahmed released thousands of political prisoners and lifted press censorship, actions that the Nobel Committee said helped advance “democracy and freedom of expression” when awarding him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. That window collapsed with the outbreak of the Tigray war in 2020.

“The media landscape is dying and shrinking,”  Mulugeta said. Before, journalists mostly feared the government.  Now attacks can come from anywhere including from online communities, political factions, armed groups, or even fellow journalists.

Sustaining work meant “walking on sharp rice.” Mulugeta cultivated relationships with regulators, checking in regularly to gauge if he had crossed invisible lines. 

“If you reach out to them, make them familiar with you, they will directly come to you before they take very harsh measures,” he explained. “They will give you a heads up.”

But push too far, and journalists disappear. Mulugeta has seen colleagues “suddenly get abducted and vanish,” only to be located weeks later in informal peripheral prisons.

Imprisonment is a constant threat. CPJ’s December 2025 prison census placed Ethiopia among Africa’s worst jailers of journalists. All five journalists listed face terrorism charges and are known for critical commentary and reporting on the Amhara conflict, - a separate insurgency that erupted in 2023 when the federal government moved to disarm regional Amhara militias known as Fano - while others are held without charge in camps like Awash Arba, denied access to lawyers or family. 

Together, all this reflects “a clear and troubling pattern of escalation of repression since 2020,” said CPJ’s Mumo. Threats extend beyond prison. She cited a Tigray militia threatening to shoot a journalist filming a protest.

In January 2021, Dawit Kebede Araya, a reporter for the regional broadcaster Tigrai TV, was gunned down by an unidentified attacker near his home. 

In a different region that same year, two unidentified attackers shot and killed Sisay Fida, a reporter and coordinator for the Oromia Broadcasting Network. 

In 2022, the Dimitsi Weyane TV station in Tigray was hit by a drone strike. 

CPJ also documents a rise in forced exile, with at least 54 journalists and media workers fleeing since 2020. 

“This exodus reflects the severity of the pressure journalists face and the lack of meaningful legal protection at home,” said Mumo.

Ethiopia’s information crisis is compounded by deep ethnic divisions that permeate newsrooms themselves. In a nation where ethnic identity often determines political alignment and recent history is marked by violence along ethnic lines, the idea of a neutral press is aspirational at best. Reporters bring their own motives to stories, making editorial oversight extraordinarily delicate. Those motives, Mulugeta said, are often ethnic or political allegiances, which express themselves in excitement about certain stories, or as agendas embedded in the writing.

“I usually get a story from reporters, and when I read it, I know something’s off,” Mulugeta explained. “You’d see the excitement, the motive within the story.”

No winning side

During moments of conflict, which happen frequently in Ethiopia’s ethnically divided regions, misinformation surges dramatically. 

“We usually get overwhelmed at that time,” Mulugeta said. “We filter based on timeliness and the flammability of that topic.”

During the Tigray war, transparency was HaqCheck’s primary safeguard. Each verification included a detailed explanation of the methodology, outlining the sources consulted, tools used and reasoning applied so readers could retrace the process themselves. It did not shield them from backlash. 

Fact-checking images attributed to government forces often prompted accusations of sympathy for rebel groups. Verifying claims linked to armed opposition movements triggered counterattacks, branding the team as state propagandists. 

“There was no winning,” said Ayalew. “If you checked one side, the other side attacked you.”

Criticism came from across the political and ethnic spectrum. Some staff quit, while others stayed but disengaged to avoid drawing attention. 

“Once you are labelled, you do not get a chance to explain yourself,” Mulugeta said. 

The label often made journalists targets of sustained online harassment. 

“If you’re not impacted,” he said, “your loved ones will be.”

For Ayalew, being attacked by both sides became a perverse badge of honour.  It meant they were doing their job correctly. However, the attacks did not stop at accusations of bias. As the only woman regularly appearing as a host on HaqCheck’s YouTube fact-checking program, Ayelew found herself singled out with deeply personal attacks. While her male colleagues went largely unchallenged, the comment sections were filled with gendered abuse directed at her.

She recalled comments questioning her appearance, criticising her for speaking about politics, and making crude sexual references. 

“They didn’t attack the content,” she said. “They attacked me – my appearance, my gender.” The attacks on her work were easier to handle than the personal ones, she said. When people from opposing sides challenged her fact-checking, it actually encouraged her because it meant she had hit a nerve and exposed a falsehood that mattered.

Gendered harassment is not unique to Ethiopia. Women journalists worldwide face similar treatment, but it was amplified by the polarised, high-stakes context of wartime fact-checking. It was Ayalew’s first sustained exposure to technology-facilitated gender-based violence. 

“It opened my eyes,” she said. “This is what happens when women become visible.”

The silent crisis

The mental health toll on Ethiopian fact-checkers and journalists remains largely unspoken. In Ethiopia, Ayalew said, mental health is often treated as a taboo or dismissed as a luxury. 

Fact-checkers often work without psychological support, spending long hours reviewing violent imagery and enduring coordinated harassment with little institutional backing.

Wartime fact-checking compounds the pressure. With only three or four fact-checkers on Haqcheck’s staff at  the height of the conflict, taking time off felt impossible, as though stepping away meant abandoning colleagues who were equally overwhelmed. 

During the war, Ayalew’s health began to deteriorate. She lost 10 kilograms and initially believed she was physically ill. Medical tests showed nothing wrong. Eventually, she sought care at a psychiatric clinic, where a doctor advised her to slow down with work. She resigned soon after. One former colleague developed alcoholism, she said, while another journalist she knows attempted suicide and spent weeks in the hospital.

Mulugeta said he has attempted several times to secure pro bono psychosocial support for his team from mental health professionals, but never succeeded. 

“We know journalists anywhere in the world are the frontliners, and fact-checkers are also the frontliners,” he said. 

Fear adds another layer of stress. Colleagues are arrested, detained, or harassed by authorities. 

“Will I be the next?” Ayalew said. “We don’t know for sure. We don’t know who we make angry in the process of doing our job.”

Burnout has been widespread. Exhaustion once led Mulugeta to step away from journalism altogether before returning months later. 

“Like a phoenix,” he said. For his own well-being, he now relies on faith. “I’m a believer, a spiritual person, and I definitely pray,” he said. “My spiritual connection with Jesus gives me support.”

Ayalew raises the issue of mental health in every training and panel discussion she leads, trying to break the silence that nearly broke her. For her, managing the crisis means preventing it for others.

When the platforms pull back

Facebook has long been the primary conduit for misinformation in Ethiopia. Telegram and YouTube are also influential, and TikTok has recently surged among younger users. These platforms often fail to moderate content effectively because they do not understand local languages or context. 

“Facebook doesn’t know the local language of Ethiopia, so it allows those derogatory words to stay on the platform for a very long period of time,” Mulugeta explained.

For years, Ethiopian fact-checkers struggled to get meaningful responses from Meta. That changed briefly after the lawsuit over the murdered professor, when the company began supporting media literacy workshops and engaging more with local organisations.

But moderation remained inconsistent. When Meta later announced it was retreating from third-party fact-checking, the impact was profound. 

“It felt like a betrayal,” Ayalew said. Meta had once told them their work informed moderation decisions. “That gave us hope. Now, that hope is gone.” 

Without meaningful action, perpetrators feel emboldened. Reporting hate speech often yields no response. 

“People don't even bother reporting anymore. They believe nothing will happen.”

For fact-checkers in Ethiopia, the dominance of social media over traditional news creates an almost impossible task. Verified reporting struggles to compete with viral content amplified by algorithms, while platforms that spread misinformation operate with minimal accountability. Decisions made thousands of miles away have consequences in fragile democracies, where online speech can translate directly into violence.

“We’re producing a society that tends to believe social media more than the mainstream media,” Mulugeta said. “It suppresses the impact of the fact-checking that you have produced.” He added, “When these companies retreat [from fact-checking], they don’t feel the impact. We do.”

Financial barriers

Ethiopia’s restrictive financial system creates serious obstacles for fact-checkers, compounding an already precarious funding landscape. Strict currency controls, limited access to foreign accounts, and bureaucratic hurdles make subscriptions to tools like satellite imagery, verification platforms, or research databases prohibitively expensive or impossible. 

Google Street View, for example, does not work properly in most of the country, and outdated satellite data further limits what can be verified remotely.

“Even when we do social media monitoring,” Ayalew said, “we do it mostly manually, because we couldn’t pay for tools.”

This scarcity of resources is mirrored in operational funding. Inform Africa, once a prominent fact-checking initiative, is currently “on hold” due to financial constraints, Mulugeta said, leaving the country with even fewer resources at a critical time. 

“Fact-checking is the most overlooked department,” he added. “But it is the most crucial.” 

Like many independent media organisations, these outlets rely on unpredictable grants, a model that reduces staffing and limits their ability to respond to surges in misinformation during crises.

After leaving HaqCheck, Ayalew founded Niqu Ethiopia, a consultancy focused on prevention through media literacy: training journalists, influencers, students, and community leaders to recognise manipulation early. 

“Fact-checking is important,” she said. “But it is not a long-term solution.” Much misinformation, she noted, is rooted in political grievances and ethnic divisions. 

“If our politics are not healed, our information ecosystem will remain toxic.”

“I love journalism,” Mulugeta said. “I love how we voice the voiceless. I love shedding light on issues. That motivates me when I want to fall back.”

He acknowledges the economic hardships: “Journalism does not pay us enough.” Still, he sees the work as a responsibility rather than a career choice. 

“Against all hardships, we should be standing steadfast. We should stick with the principles of journalism. There is no other option.”

“There are people who hate me, who do not support my agenda,” he said. “But people are reading my articles, even people who are not supporting me.”

His advice for young journalists entering the field is stark. 

“They should be ready for everything,” he said. “This work is full of hardship and uncertainty.” 

He stresses the human side of the work. Mental health cannot be ignored. 

“There is no easy road in this profession,” he said. “But the work matters.”