(This picture is borrowed from dear friends at Wikipedia (they deserve donations and support!) and they got the picture from NASA which being a government agency places it in the public domain.)
Social media, the internet, broadcasts almost infinite amounts of lies, misinformation and abuse. It causes severe and lasting harm to our society. And yet our political system seems unable to cope in anyway, not even able to curb the international scams that plague the elderly and the young.
The other day I was reading Al Jazeera, probably the best source of information about the war in the Ukraine, (they have daily coverage), and noticed an interesting editorial. Mercy Mutemi is the managing partner at Nzili & Sumbi Advocates, a law firm. She wrote a very fine editorial about efforts in African Courts to rein in the abuses of the Internet.
Here is a link to the editorial:
In April 2025, the Human Rights Court in Kenya issued an unprecedented ruling that it has the jurisdiction to hear a case about harmful content on one of Meta’s platforms. The lawsuit was filed in 2022 by Abraham Meareg, the son of an Ethiopian academic who was murdered after he was doxxed and threatened on Facebook, Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopian human rights activist, who was also doxxed and threatened on Facebook, and Katiba Institute, a Kenyan non-profit that defends constitutionalism. They maintain that Facebook’s algorithm design and its content moderation decisions made in Kenya resulted in harm done to two of the claimants, fuelled the conflict in Ethiopia and led to widespread human rights violations within and outside Kenya.
Further down in the article she very eloquently explains the significance of the court’s decision thusly:
The ultimate goal of the Bill of Rights, a common feature in African constitutions, is to uphold and protect the inherent dignity of all people. Kenya’s Bill of Rights, for example, has as its sole mission to preserve the dignity of individuals and communities and to promote social justice and the realisation of the potential of all human beings. The supremacy of the Constitution also guarantees that, should there be safe harbour provisions in the laws of that country, they would not be a sufficient liability shield for platforms if their business decisions do not ultimately uphold human rights.
I would have liked to summarize the findings about this case but I unable to approach the level of her eloquence. She states the principle in question very well indeed.
The Internet is a world wide phenomenon and while we here in the United States suffer terribly from its abuses, we are only a small proportion of its victims.
And that means that justice systems all over the world have jurisdiction when their citizens are harmed. The argument here is that a internet provider has immunity provided its business decisions do not result in the diminishment of guaranteed human right.
Our enforcement in the United States has been lacking because of legal complexity and the horrible unsustainable influence of the Tech Bros, our wannabe Oligarchs.
Their time is coming.
We have to rise up as a nation and end this constant stream of bots, foreign influence, etc. It is an open decaying sewer of utter evil and it harms all of us.
We can do better.
James Alan Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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