Amnesty International has urged Ethiopian authorities to immediately lift restrictions on several social media networks that were imposed a month ago.
Facebook, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, and YouTube are among the sites that have been blocked. It is not a total internet outage.
Although no official reason has been given for the blockage, it occurred following a split in the popular Orthodox Church, which heightened tensions in the deeply religious country.
Each side had planned rival rallies as a show of strength at the time, but the demonstrations were prohibited, and the standoff appears to have eased since then.
Although some people have been using virtual private network (VPN) software to access the sites, social media content creators in Ethiopia have complained that traffic is down.
According to the London-based VPN research firm TOP10VPN, demand for VPNs in Ethiopia peaked at 3,651% at one point in the last month.
Flavia Mwangovya, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for east and southern Africa, has urged the authorities “to lift this blockade without delay and to end this culture of interfering with people’s right to express themselves and to seek and receive information”.
The government has used internet shutdowns as a common tactic.
Some parts of Tigray’s northern region, where a brutal two-year conflict ended in November, still lack internet access.
Internet shutdowns, according to government supporters, are intended to reduce the spread of false and inflammatory messages and to reduce tensions.
