Ethiopia: resumption of fighting under fire of disinformation
A coalition of seven armed groups, including the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Amhara Fano national movement, has launched an offensive on several fronts against the federal army, with fighting reported in several regions of Ethiopia, including the north. RFI's fact-checking unit found that a video presented as showing the TPLF capturing an Ethiopian army battalion had been taken out of context and had circulated online for at least five years, including a broadcast by the Eritrean outlet Asena TV on 7 July 2021. It also found that an image of a downed drone attributed to the Coalition of Ethiopian Popular Forces for Survival was entirely generated by artificial intelligence, with the detector used indicating Google's Gemini 3.
Why it matters: The episode places the renewed fighting in Ethiopia within the briefing's disinformation theme, since the conflict is accompanied by misleading, decontextualised and AI-generated material circulating on social media.