Yordanos Bezabih, an Ethiopian women’s rights activist, had faced online threats for years: of acid attacks, gang-rape and death. She tried her best to ignore the abuse as she continued her advocacy work. But in 2025, the threats became more menacing. In April, an anonymous Telegram group with 6,000 subscribers organised an effort to track down her location. They shared deepfakes of her – nude images and videos. The following month, a stranger started to film her in the streets, calling her by her social media handle. In summer, thieves broke into her house and stole her laptop. Soon after, her Telegram account was hacked and her private photos and messages were circulated on social media. The perpetrators later circulated her address, she says, demanding she be found and “executed”. In August, she left Ethiopia on a fellowship for human rights defenders. She has not returned since; it is too dangerous. “I have been forced to remain outside the country in order to protect my safety and continue my work,” she says.

Bezabih is one of a small but growing number of feminists and women’s rights defenders who have left Ethiopia over the past two years, as online violence has become all-pervasive and uncontrolled. Three years after Facebook was accused of allowing hate speech to spread unchecked in Ethiopia, amid genocidal violence against ethnic Tigrayans during the civil war – claims rejected by Meta – social media inciters in Ethiopia have found a new target: women online… The Guardian spoke to Bezabih, and to Maya Misikir, as well as two human rights defenders in Ethiopia and abroad. Several of them asked to remain anonymous, fearing that calling attention to themselves would invite threats. They described a world in which extreme online abuse has become rampant – and normalised. The war in Tigray, when mass rape, sexual slavery and sexual torture of women and children by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers took place, has shaped an online environment in which calling for feminists to be killed is unremarkable. “Sexual violence was weaponised as a form of domination,” says the anonymous activist

Research by the Centre for Information Resilence (CIR) bears out the scale of online gendered abuse in Ethiopia. Its 2024 report, Silence, Shamed and Threatened, found that technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) has become “normalised to the point of invisibility” and is a daily occurrence with severe offline impacts including psychological harm, physical assault and arrests… In another 2024 study, the CIR analysed gendered hate speech in four languages (Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya and English) to gain insight into the nature of TFGBV in Ethiopia, where lack of data is one of the main barriers to addressing the problem. Its findings are designed to raise awareness of TFGBV, particularly within government institutions, which, activists say, are failing to protect women and girls from online assaults or to hold perpetrators accountable… In Ethiopia, where homosexuality is illegal, members of the LGBTQ+ community have been attacked in public after being outed; some have been beaten and killed. Being called homosexual comes with the threat of a prison sentence. “It really just quickly escalated,” says Maya Misikir. “There were a lot of men making videos about her. And YouTube, like, just went crazy.” The online mob began to search for Lella’s home address. For a time, she stopped leaving the house. When she went out, people recognised her in cafes, or when she was stopped in traffic. She debated waiting for the furore to die down. Then, in November 2024, she left the country. She has been abroad ever since and it is unclear if she will be able to return…