It’s been over a year since my last day as a content moderator for Facebook and Instagram in Nairobi, Kenya, but I still can’t sleep without having nightmares.
“Every day starting at 7 a.m., I would review between 500 and 1,000 posts on Instagram and Facebook that were reported for violating our platform rules. About 80% of what I saw was blatant abuse, hate and violence. My job was to look at the video, determine if it violated any of Facebook’s Community Standards and then forget about it.”
It’s incredible what humans are capable of doing to each other. I thought of my children and parents and told myself that I was protecting them from what I had seen.
My family were refugees. I crossed the border from Ethiopia to Kenya when I was three years old to escape conflict. I took this job because Facebook and Instagram needed Oromo speakers. When I sat down at my workstation on my first day, I was confronted with the violence my family had fled.
I had watched as others who spoke Amharic slaughtered people from back home while they pleaded for mercy in Oromo. Scene after scene from across Ethiopia flashed across my screen.
In my home country, we were killing each other. But here we were, sitting side by side with Oromos, Amharas, and Tigrayans in that big glass building, scrubbing the internet of the worst aspects of the war as the violence escalated to take over most of our workdays. Others in the office experienced similar trauma from content coming from other conflict zones.
Our offices, computers, desks, and chairs were all provided for us by Sama, an outsourcing company in San Francisco. But all the work we did was for Meta, the owner of Facebook. This work was damaging to our mental and emotional health. We tried to support each other. We constantly reminded each other that we were protecting our community from the harm this content would cause. But in order to protect our community, we had to endure harm ourselves.
We learned to support each other and continued to do so even after the day we were all “laid off” last January.
However, our jobs didn’t disappear, they were just handed over to another contractor called Majorelle. It was hard work, but we needed work, so we tried to apply. We were all rejected.
It was clear that we had been blacklisted, presumably because we had negotiated for better mental health care. So several hundred of us filed a lawsuit in Kenya against Sama and Meta, alleging that they had violated Kenyan labor laws by firing us. And we won.
The judge found that Mehta was our “bona fide employer” and ordered the company to pay us our back wages and provide us with mental and medical care. At first, we were relieved that the law was on our side. But then we realized there was something more powerful than the law.
It’s been over a year since the first court order. Further legal victories have followed, but Meta continues to ignore them. The Kenyan government has not supported us either. Kenyan President William Ruto and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed recently attended the opening of Sama’s new Nairobi headquarters. The war rages on, and my colleagues and I are scattered across the African continent, waiting for our paychecks.
On May 23, Ruto will become the first African leader in nearly two decades to make an official visit to the White House. As they discuss the future of U.S. trade with Kenya, I hope they will take into consideration the workers who are put at risk when U.S. companies are allowed to exploit African workers and break local labor laws with impunity.
Meta broke the law. I am frustrated, anxious, and still lose sleep over the trauma I endured while working for them. I and many of my former colleagues have formed a union with other content moderators at companies like Meta, TikTok, ChatGPT, and others so these powerful companies cannot continue to exploit us and spit us out. The law is on our side, but it is only the law of Kenya, and Meta seems to believe they exist somewhere above that law. Who is to tell them otherwise?
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