Continuous Ethiopian youths’ protests in Ethiopia for two years, forced the EPRDF’s government to reform that has brought Abiy Ahmed to the Prime Minister position on April 2, 2018. This change has resulted in so many improvements on content and structure of the media including the online platform. Mostly, media had been filled with unison messages. Nevertheless, the situation did not last long; ethnic tension has risen again; ethnically motivated conflicts have become prevalent and caused peoples’ death, and displacement. Hate speech and fake news also seemingly become common both on the some mainstream and online media, which ultimately forced the state to endorse a law to suppress hate speech and fake news. However, there have not been academic studies, which investigate how social media hate speech is prevalent, perceived, and being regulated in Ethiopia. To achieve these main objectives, six main research questions were set. They are: To what extent has social media hate speech been prevalent in the political reform socio-political context of Ethiopia? What are the severity levels, and the natures of social media hate speech? What are the major trigger factors of social media hate speech? How do young Ethiopian social media users perceive social media hate speech? How are Ethiopian social media users exposed and react to social media hate speech, and how is social media hate speech regulated in Ethiopia? To find answers to these research questions, the study employed a mixed-method research approach to answer those questions and used a multi-stage sampling of users’ comments offered on three purposeful selected Ethnic-media’s social media sites, namely ASRAT, OMN, and DWTV. In addition to the content analysis of the online comments on the Facebook pages and the YouTube channels of the three media, the dissertation included focus group discussions, interviews, and documents analysis tools to collect relevant data. The study found a substantial prevalence of social media hate speech, dominated by offensive severity, and less incitement to violence, and genocide. It is also found that the ethnicpolitics based hate was overriding. Identity-driven contesting and reform incidents were the main trigger factors of social media hate speech. It is argued, the law in place to minimize hate speech, may be used by the executive body for political interests to silence critical voices. As such, the prevalent of hate speech on the online media will have severe effects on the Ethiopian community. Along with the law, political dialogue to dig out the root causes of the hate speech, and enhancing media literacy in the country could be the potential solutions to deter hate speech in Ethiopia. Keywords: social media; hate prevalence; hate severity; hate natures; trigger hate; hate perceptions; speech regulation; Ethiopia