Internet Shutdowns in Ethiopia: The Weapon of Choice

Shutdowns as a tool of information control

With more than 20 instances of internet shutdowns authorised since 2016, it can be argued that their utilisation has been institutionalised and normalised in Ethiopia Already in 2019, in the second year of Abiy’s tenure, internet shutdowns occurred eight times, often without governmental justifications. Several more shutdowns followed in 2020 and 2021, intensifying in both severity and duration. The official justifications cited ‘national security’ and ‘counterterrorism’, ‘exams cheating’ and prevention of incendiary content as reasons for the shutdowns. The validity of those justifications is frequently contested by advocacy NGOs, human rights groups and researchers who offer alternative narratives.

The most frequently alleged motive behind the shutdowns in Ethiopia is the use of internet disruptions as means of controlling the free flow of information. This narrative implies attempts by a federal government to prevent the dissemination of material that threatens the ruling regime by discrediting its actions. Information which managed to escape the blacked-out areas illustrated that virtually all the cases of internet disruptions in Ethiopia were accompanied by events whose coverage the government would be tempted to interfere with. This includes the reported human rights abuses during governmental counterinsurgency action in Oromia in spring 2020, or the reports of mass casualties amid the violent crackdown on anti-governmental protests in summer 2020. In the case of the latest shutdown (November 2021), the government was suspected of interfering with the spread of information about the defeats of the federal army, while the internet shutdown in Tigray authorised in November 2020 puts a thick layer of fog on the gravity of humanitarian crisis in the region up to the present day. In most cases the internet disruptions were further compounded by arbitrary detentions of journalists, which only further suggests that it was the government’s intention to interfere with the coverage of the situation.

The narrative that Ethiopia’s internet shutdowns are being used as a tool of information control, which limits transparency and makes reporting on the situation extremely difficult, is highly plausible. The broader literature on internet shutdowns further suggests that there might also be alternative, less frequently addressed motives behind the use of this instrument.

The shutdown in the Tigray region was authorised in November 2020 as tensions between the Abiy’s government and the Tigray’s regional party (TPLF) escalated into a civil war. Just like in the case of the internet shutdown in Oromia, the authorisation of the shutdown in Tigray coincided with the launch of the offensive against the TPLF forces, suggesting a military-strategic motive behind it. No official justifications of the shutdown were issued, but the measure was accompanied by the accusations that the region was threatening the country’s sovereignty. Unlike in the case of Oromia, the internet shutdown in Tigray was not lifted after several months. Imposed as a military strategy, the shutdown was kept in place as a collective punishment as the federal forces failed to rapidly defeat the TPLF. The example of the shutdown in Tigray illustrates that this measure can serve multiple purposes and that the government can have more than one rationale for using it.