Leaked Documents Show That Ethiopia’s Ruling Elites Are Hiring Social Media Trolls (And Watching Porn) · Global Voices
EPRDF rally in Addis Ababa in 2010. Photo by <PERSON>/BBC World Service via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Over the past two months, a series of leaked documents from Ethiopia’s powerful political elites have been circulating online.
Among other revelations, the leaks show that the Ethiopian government has been paying online commenters to influence social media conversations in the ruling party's favor. The documents include hundreds of pages of chat logs and email correspondence of Ethiopia’s top government officials, multiple government planning documents and top-secret meeting records.
The leaks have come at what may be a turning point in Ethiopia's recent political crisis. Since mid-2015, thousands across Ethiopia rose up, demanding more political freedoms and social equality and a stop to government land grabs in the Oromia region, which represents Ethiopia's largest ethnic group. The government response was brutal: Hundreds have been killed, thousands have been arrested, and critical voices — both on and offline — have been systematically silenced.
Among the recent leaks, which began to circulate on Facebook in November 2017, one of the most revealing documents is a list of individuals who appear to have been paid to promote the ruling coalition on social media. The list shows the names of the so-called “social media commentators” along with their job titles and a precise amount of money that they apparently received for their online postings. Most of the people listed are government employees.
The list corroborates previous evidence that the Ethiopian government has been hiring online commenters to promote its agenda and harass its opponents.
Online communities in Ethiopia have been calling these paid commenters “cocas”, a colloquialism in Amharic (the most widely spoken language in the country) that can be translated as “contemptible cadres.” In Amharic, this term typically refers to people who sell themselves for easy money. But in this case, most of the commenters listed in the leaked directory are already on the government payroll.
Who is responsible for the leaks?
The origin of the leaks has been rumored and contested at several levels. The documents were originally sent to diaspora activists from the at least two Facebook accounts, both of which belong to government employees, in November 2017.
The first known leak, of the “coca” list, came from the Facebook account of <PERSON>, an employee of the communications affairs office of the Tigray state. 960
<PERSON> first denied sending the documents, claiming his account was hacked. But he then backtracked on this claim. It is now rumored that he has been dismissed from his job.
Soon after the initial leak, more documents began arriving in the inboxes of diaspora activists, this time coming from the Facebook account of the Director of the Federal Communications Affairs office, <PERSON>. Shortly thereafter, <PERSON> began to publicly shame those government officials who are implicated in the leaks. On January 18, he denigrated Deputy PM <PERSON> in a public Facebook post.
It is unclear whether <PERSON> sent the documents himself have been hacked.
Social media ‘cocas’ push pro-government discourse
The revelations of political and state officials paying “cocas” to promote the ruling party agenda online correspond with a recent rise in polarization and hate speech on social media, alongside increased online persecution of independent journalists.
The leaked “coca” list reveals that at least thirteen commentators were each paid at least USD $300 (a large sum in Ethiopia, where average GDP per capita was USD $660 in 2016) for blog posts or Facebook messages that they wrote at the behest of the ruling coalition.
List of paid internet commentators. Image widely circulating on Facebook
Among individuals named on the list are <PERSON> and <PERSON>, publishers of two Ethiopian internet news site HornAffairs and Awaramba Times respectively. The two journalists have long been accused of cheer-leading a pro-government information campaign especially during a heightened political tension.
In recent years, independent Ethiopian journalists reporting on government affairs, corruption and human rights have been arrested or exiled en masse. The resulting gap in news coverage has thus been filled by opposition activists and protesters who often work with diaspora-based media outlets to draw global attention to the brutal military crackdown on protesters that has killed more than 1200 people and has led to several mass arrests since mid-2015.
On the heels of the list came a separate leak of what appears to be a proposal to counter opposition groups using social media platforms. The Amharic-language document from the office of Ethiopia’s longtime governing coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF), enumerates solutions and strategies to curtail the influence of online diaspora-based activists. 960