LGBTQ+ People In Ethiopia Blame Attacks On Their Community On Inciteful And Lingering TikTok Videos

Kenya’s NAIROBI — Members of Ethiopia’s LGBTQ+ community claim to experience a wave of online harassment and physical assaults, and they attribute a large portion of this to the social media platform TikTok, which they accuse of neglecting to remove messages encouraging the whipping, stabbing, and murder of homosexual and transgender individuals.

According to House of Guramayle, a local LGBTQ+ support group, some TikTok users are also outing Ethiopians by revealing their names, photos, and online accounts on one of the nation’s most widely used social networking sites.

In Ethiopia, homosexual behavior carries a maximum 15-year prison sentence. While LGBTQ+ persons have historically experienced abuse, activists claim that the antagonism has reached a new level in the predominantly conservative East African nation, whose population of nearly 120 million is split between Christianity and Islam.

The co-founder of House of Guramayle, Bahiru Shewaye, said that TikTok was being exploited to encourage violence. Many videos have been reported to TikTok, according to Bahiru, but “we are still waiting for them to take action.”

The Associated Press looked at several videos on Thursday that seemed to violate the community rules of TikTok by encouraging violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

On Friday night, Ben Rathe, a spokeswoman for TikTok, claimed that the company had taken down the videos and banned the users for breaking its community standards.

Members of Ethiopia’s LGBTQ+ community claim to experience a wave of online harassment and physical assaults.

A well-known evangelical Christian pastor urges gay individuals to be publicly stripped naked and whipped in one video that the AP saw.

The pastor’s account has over 250,000 followers. “Then (gay) people all over the world would say, ‘Oh, these (Ethiopian) people, this is what they do to gays, therefore we will not go to that country,'” the pastor says. It was published on August 5.

Another TikTok user advocated stabbing gay men in the buttocks in a video uploaded on August 2. A third was published this week, and a young man said, “We should find them and kill them,” followed by a foot-stomping motion.

The videos are in Amharic, the national tongue of Ethiopia.

Uncertainty surrounds the tapes’ origins, but Bahiru claimed that Uganda’s recent anti-LGBT law—which calls for the execution of those who engage in “aggravated homosexuality”—is a factor.

LGBTQ+ Many Ethiopians have recently fled overseas; according to reports, the increased hateful content has made them feel insecure. One nonbinary individual claimed they were assaulted by a group of guys in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, last month and are currently in the neighboring country of Kenya.

They said, “It is very terrifying.” “I believe I will remain here as long as the situation in Ethiopia persists. Even though everything has always been horrible, this time feels different.

Members of Ethiopia’s LGBTQ+ community claim to experience a wave of online harassment and physical assaults.

Another LGBTQ+ man claimed to have been outed twice on TikTok. He is a student in Addis Ababa. He was severely beaten by a bunch of classmates at a restaurant in May, not long after the first outing video surfaced online; they shattered his cheek.

After that, “I don’t feel safe at school, so I stopped going,” he claimed. The footage, he claimed, was later taken down.

Late in July, the second outing video was uploaded and has now received over 275,000 views. Photos of different people and groups are displayed in a slideshow with the caption “Homosexuals live freely in Ethiopia.” It reads, “Let’s kill them; give us their address.”

Public institutions in Ethiopia have been charged with fostering discrimination. In a message published on Facebook last week, Addis Abeba’s tourism office urged hotels not to permit “homosexual activities” on their property and that “action will be taken” if they did. The bureau is a division of the Addis Ababa city government.

The local police department soon after established a hotline for reporting “illegal activities that deviate from the law and social values.”

This group was already at risk, according to Bahiru. But it has gotten out of hand because of the new scope of these appeals for violence.

Advocates for the LGBTQ+ community have long cautioned that online abuse and bigotry can result in physical violence offline.

According to the advocacy group GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index released earlier this year, all major social media platforms, including TikTok, do a poor job of shielding LGBTQ+ users from hate speech and harassment, especially those who are transgender, non-binary, or gender non-conforming.

SOURCE – (AP)