Yordanos Bezabih spent years trying to ignore the online threats. The acid attack warnings, gang-rape fantasies, and death threats that flooded her social media feeds were the price, she thought, of being a women's rights activist in Ethiopia. She kept advocating, kept speaking out, kept believing the digital violence would remain contained to her screen.
Then, in April 2025, an anonymous Telegram group with 6,000 subscribers organized a coordinated effort to track down her physical location. They shared deepfake nude images and videos of her across platforms. The digital violence was crossing into her physical world.
"I have been forced to remain outside the country in order to protect my safety and continue my work," Bezabih says.
In August 2025, she left Ethiopia on a fellowship for human rights defenders. She has not returned since. Bezabih is one of a growing number of Ethiopian feminists and women's rights defenders who have fled the country over the past two years as technology-facilitated gender-based violence has spiraled beyond platform control or government intervention.
From War Hate Speech to Gender-Based Terror
The escalation represents a disturbing evolution in Ethiopia's digital landscape. Three years after Facebook was accused of allowing hate speech to spread unchecked during the Tigray civil war — claims Meta rejected — social media inciters have found a new target: women online.
The connection is not coincidental. The war in Tigray, marked by mass rape, sexual slavery, and sexual torture of women and children by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, has shaped an online environment where calling for feminists to be killed has become normalized.
"Sexual violence was weaponised as a form of domination," an Ethiopian women's rights activist who requested anonymity says. "It's created a sense of normalisation even in other regions of the country where the war hasn't happened."
This normalization has created what researchers describe as a perfect storm: high Telegram penetration in Ethiopia, limited platform moderation in Amharic, Tigrinya, and Oromo, and a government with a mixed record on digital rights that has shown little interest in policing online threats against women activists.
The Machinery of Digital Violence
The campaign against Bezabih illustrates how sophisticated these attacks have become. After the April Telegram mobilization, a stranger began filming her on the streets in May 2025, calling her by her social media handle — a clear signal that online surveillance had moved offline.
By summer, thieves had broken into her house and stolen her laptop. Soon after, her Telegram account was hacked and her private photos and messages circulated on social media. The perpetrators then circulated her physical address, demanding she be found and "executed."
Advertisement
The escalation from digital harassment to physical surveillance to home invasion represents what experts call the "online-to-offline" threat trajectory — where digital violence creates the conditions for real-world harm.
Maya Misikir , whose sister Lella Misikir is another activist who has fled Ethiopia, describes the ideological framework driving the attacks:
"If you self-describe as a feminist, then you become a target, as that word is associated nowadays with anti-Ethiopian values and traditions, against the core family unit."
A Growing Exodus
The anonymous Ethiopian women's rights activist who spoke to The Guardian painted a stark picture of the current environment. Feminists are "dehumanised. Their lives are unvalued," she said.
To a loose ecosystem of conservative influencers and a growing manosphere, she explained, women who speak out about gender-based violence are seen as "against Ethiopian identity, and hence they must be exterminated."
Globally, research suggests that up to 60% of women have experienced some form of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, but Ethiopia's post-conflict environment and limited digital governance have created particularly dangerous conditions.
Democratic Implications
The exodus of women activists comes at a critical moment for Ethiopian democracy. With elections scheduled for June 2026, the silencing of women's voices through digital violence represents a significant contraction of civic space.
