Multilingual Misinformation Pathways in Ethiopia: Translation Chains, Bridge Actors, and Community Verification Across Networked Publics

Abstract

Ethiopia’s multilingual, crisis-shaped media environment reveals a dynamic often missed in misinformation research: Claims frequently travel across Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Somali publics through translation, code switching, screenshot forwarding, and cross-platform reposting. Using qualitatively driven multimethod evidence from public content tracing; semistructured interviews with moderators, journalists, diaspora media workers, religious leaders, and ordinary users; and an embedded survey experiment, the analysis reconstructs how multilingual claims mutate and accelerate. Translation often functions as editorial recontextualization, with predictable drift in attribution, threat framing, and calls to action. A small set of bridge actors and platform pathways, especially Telegram to Facebook and diaspora relay loops, drives cross-language amplification. The article extends the two-step flow theory by showing that, in multilingual networked publics, bridge actors function not only as relays of information but also as translators, framers, and local authorizers of credibility. Verification succeeds when corrections are language-matched and carried by locally credible intermediaries; institutional corrections often lose force when translated or socially misaligned.