Normalising exploitation in Africa
In order to keep vile content off its platforms’ feeds, Meta has thousands of subcontracted content moderators in the US and outsourcing hubs such as Manila in the Philippines and Nairobi in Kenya. They’re working for low wages, under stressful conditions, with lingering traumatic effects. This has resulted in numerous lawsuits being filed against the company, in the US, Europe and, most recently, Kenya.
Daniel Motaung, a former Facebook content moderator hired by Sama – an outsourcing company that dubs itself an “ethical AI” outfit – filed a lawsuit against the two companies in Kenya in May. The lawsuit alleges that, in addition to paying content moderators far less than elsewhere for the same work, Sama also engaged in forced labour, human trafficking and union busting.
Sama has denied the allegations, which a spokesperson said are “disappointing and inaccurate”. Speaking to British newspaper Metro, they added that the company offers “competitive wage, benefits, upward mobility, and a robust mental health and wellness program”.
After the lawsuit was filed, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters: “We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support. We also encourage content reviewers to raise issues when they become aware of them and regularly conduct independent audits to ensure our partners are meeting the high standards we expect.”
Sama’s Africa operations are headquartered in Nairobi. When Facebook announced in 2019 that it was setting up content review operations in the Kenyan capital via Sama (then Samasource), I cautioned against celebrating this as a ‘win’ that was bringing digital jobs to the continent. There was more to it than met the eye, I felt.
My misgivings appeared to be validated when Motaung’s account of his time as a content moderator in Nairobi was published earlier this year. It was a debilitating story of how adverse labour practices around content moderation have made their way to Africa. Since then, more moderators in Kenya have asked that non-disclosure agreements that hinder them from testifying in court be lifted.
Samasource’s founder, Leila Janah, who passed away in January 2020, once defended paying low wages to African workers by saying the company did not want to distort local labour markets. Importing problematic work and replicating the local market’s own problems (such as low wages) is, I guess, the Big Tech way.
During the pandemic, this kind of work was even glamourised, with Sama being profiled in Wired magazine for moving workers to hotels so that they could continue doing data labelling for firms such as Google, despite the lockdown imposed by the Kenyan government.
As the Wired article says, Sama has branded its contracts to recruit low-wage workers in Africa for these kinds of ‘janitorial’ tasks for Big Tech, “a kind of aid program”, with which it is lifting up people in the poorest places on earth.
Following Motaung’s whistleblowing, Sama has offered a pay rise to its content moderators in Kenya. Meanwhile, Meta’s lawyers offered the standard Big Tech defence in developing countries – that the company cannot be sued in the country because it is “not resident, trading or domiciled in Kenya”.
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