Post falsely claims altered video shows anti-government protests in northern Ethiopia

Fighting was ongoing between the Ethiopian army and Fano rebels in the country’s northern Amhara region in October 2024. As a result, disinformation spread by both sides of the conflict has been surging on social media. A video shared on Facebook claims to show recent anti-government protests in the region’s Dessie city. However, this is false: the footage features a rally held in October 2022 against the West's alleged interference in Ethiopia’s internal affairs during the then-Tigray war. AFP Fact Check also established that the audio section had been edited and replaced with sound from another unrelated clip shot in February 2020.

"Hello Hello… Sleeping people, are you awake?" reads the post in Tigrinya, one of Ethiopia's languages.

It has been shared more than 280 times and viewed over 180,000 times since it was published on October 16, 2024.

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Screenshot of the altered post, taken on October 23, 2024

A text overlay splashed across the clip says: "A very dangerous event is taking place in the city of Dessie."

Dessie is a city located in the south Wollo zone in the Amhara region. 

The 20-second clip shows large crowds of demonstrators marching through a city.

"Down with the unreliable government! Down with the government that doesn't care about the suffering of the people,” they appear to be chanting.

Continued fighting 

The conflict in the Ethiopian region of Amhara began in July 2023 after the government decided to ban all regional armed forces.

The clashes escalated into a full-scale war in October 2024 after the government reportedly deployed additional troops to suppress the Fano rebels (archived here). 

On October 22, 2024, local media reported fierce fighting between the warring parties in several regional towns (archived here). 

However, the clip does not show a recent anti-government protest in Amhara. 

Old video 

AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.

The search results found that the original video had been published on the official YouTube channel of the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) on October 23, 2022 (archived here). 

The footage was part of a three-minute-long news bulletin whose caption reads in Amharic: “A public demonstration was held in Dessie city earlier today”. 

“Dessie city residents have protested against Western countries interfering with Ethiopia's internal affairs,” says a reporter at the beginning of the original video. 

During the Tigray War in October 2022, about a month before the end of the conflict, the international media also reported on Ethiopian demonstrations against external interference (archived here). 

The misleading clip shared online is a loop of the first 10 seconds of the news bulletin. 

Altered audio 

Moreover, AFP Fact Check determined that the clip’s audio had  also been altered through digital manipulation. 

A key search for “demonstrations in Amhara region” revealed another video showing a rally in Gondar city in the Amhara region (archived here). 

The 47-second-long video was originally published on the Amhara Satellite Radio And Television Media House (ASRAT) YouTube channel with the Amharic-language headline caption: “A peaceful demonstration held in Gondar demanding the release of kidnapped Amhara students”. 

Some 17 ethnic Amhara students were allegedly kidnapped from Dembi Dolo University in Western Oromia in November 2019 (archived here), Amnesty International reported on March 25, 2020. The fate of the students has not been known since then.

Twenty seconds into the original video the demonstrators can be heard chanting “Down with the unreliable government! Down with the government that doesn't care about the suffering of the people”.

In the altered clip, the reporter's voice from 2022’s Dessie public demonstration was replaced with this audio from the 2020 Gonder protest to imply that the Amhara region recently witnessed an anti-government protest.