The post falsely claims that an altered video shows anti-government protests in northern Ethiopia

Scattered throughout the clip is a text overlay that reads: “A very dangerous event is taking place in the town of Dessie.”

Dessie is a town in the Southern Wollo Zone in the Amhara Region.

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

“Down with the unreliable government! Down with the government that doesn’t care about the suffering of the people,” they seem to shout.

The fighting continued

The conflict in Ethiopia's Amhara region began in July 2023 after the government decided to ban all regional forces.

Clashes escalated into an all-out 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 heavy fighting between the warring parties in several regional cities (archived here).

However, the clip does not show any current protests against the government in Amhara.

Old video

AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to perform a reverse image search on keyframes from the video.

The search results revealed that the original video was posted on the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) official YouTube channel on October 23, 2022 (archived here).

The footage was part of a three-minute news broadcast, the caption of which reads in Amharic: “A public demonstration took place in the town of Dessie today.”

“Residents of Dessie town protested against Western countries’ interference in Ethiopia’s internal affairs,” a reporter says at the beginning of the original video.

During the Tigray War in October 2022, about a month before the end of the conflict, 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 newscast.

Changed tone

In addition, AFP Fact Check found that the clip's audio had also been altered through digital manipulation.

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

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

According to Amnesty International reports on March 25, 2020, approximately 17 Amhara students were abducted from Dembi Dolo University in Western Oromia in November 2019 (archived here). The fate of the students has not been known since then.

Twenty seconds into the original video, protesters 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 the Dessie public demonstration in 2022 was replaced with this audio recording from the Gonder protests in 2020 to suggest that an anti-government protest recently took place in the Amhara region.