Meta declined to comment on the specific claims while litigation is ongoing, but said it required outsourcing firms to offer counselling and healthcare, and pay above local industry standards – and said it provided technical solutions to limit exposure to graphic materials, such as blurring and an opt-out of the autoplay function, whereby videos or pictures are played in a nonstop stream.
A mum of two young children, I was recruited from my native South Africa with the promise to join the growing tech sector in Kenya for a Facebook subcontractor, Sama, as a content moderator.
The pay and conditions are not better, with wages for some data workers being as low as US$.89 (70p) an hour and content moderators getting US$2.
These issues are currently the subject of a class action lawsuit in Kenya brought by 185 former content moderators against Sama and Facebook’s owner, Meta, as reported by the Guardian.
When approached for comment, Sama said that as of March 2023, they were no longer involved in content moderation and no longer employ content moderators.