NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Nathan Nkunzimana was on the verge of tears and recalled seeing a video of a child being abused and another of a woman being killed.
His job as a content moderator for a Facebook contractor meant he had to deal with horror eight hours a day so the world wouldn’t have to. Some overwhelmed colleagues would scream or cry, he said.
Now Nkunzimana is among nearly 200 former employees in Kenya suing Facebook and local contractor Sama over working conditions that could impact social media moderators around the world. It is the first known court challenge outside of the United States, where Facebook settled with moderators in 2020.
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The group has been employed at the social media giant’s outsourced content moderation center in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, where staff members review posts, videos, messages and other content from users across Africa and remove any illegal or harmful material that violates Service violates the Community Standards and Terms.
The presenters, from several African countries, are demanding a $1.6 billion compensation fund after alleging poor working conditions, including inadequate psychological support and low wages. Earlier this year, they were fired by Sama when she quit the content moderation business. They claim the companies are ignoring a court order to extend the contract until the case is resolved.
Facebook and Sama have defended their employment practices.
With little certainty as to how long it will be before the case is resolved, the presenters expressed desperation at the tightening of money and work permits, and wrestling with the traumatic images that haunt them.
“If you feel comfortable browsing and flipping through the Facebook page, it’s because someone like me was on that screen asking, ‘Is it okay to be here?'” said Nkunzimana, a father of three Children of Burundi The Associated Press in Nairobi.
The 33-year-old said moderating content is like “soldiers” taking a bullet for Facebook users, with staff monitoring harmful content depicting killing, suicide and sexual assault and ensuring it is removed .
For Nkunzimana and others, the work began with a sense of pride and a sense of being “community heroes,” he said.
But when exposure to alarming content revived past trauma for some like him, who had fled political or ethnic violence to their homes, moderators found little support and a culture of secrecy.
They were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. Personal items such as phones were not allowed in the workplace.
After his shift, Nkuzimana would return home exhausted, often locking himself in his bedroom to forget what he had seen. Even his wife had no idea what his job was like.
These days he locks himself in his room to avoid questions from his sons about why he isn’t working anymore and why they probably can’t afford the school fees anymore. The salary for content moderators was $429 per month, with non-Kenyans receiving a small expat allowance on top of that.
US-based Facebook contractor Sama has done little to ensure moderators are offered post-traumatic professional counseling at his Nairobi office, Nkuzimana said. He said advisers were poorly trained to deal with his peers’ experiences. Now that he’s out of psychiatric care, he goes to church instead.
Facebook parent Meta explained that its contractors are contractually obligated to pay their employees above industry standards in the markets they serve and provide on-site support from trained professionals.
A spokesman said Meta could not comment on the Kenya case.
In an email to the AP, Sama said that salaries on offer in Kenya were four times the local minimum wage and that “over 60% of male employees and over 70% of female employees lived below the international poverty line (less than US$1.90 -dollars per year). day)” before setting.
Sama said all employees have full access to one-to-one consultations “without fear of consequences”. The contractor also called a recent court decision to extend presenter contracts “confusing” and claimed that a later decision staying that decision meant it had not come into effect.
Such work has the potential to be “incredibly psychologically damaging,” but job seekers in lower-income countries could take the risk in exchange for an office job in the tech industry, said Sarah Roberts, a content moderation expert at the University of California, Los Angeles .
In countries like Kenya, where cheap labor is plentiful, outsourcing such sensitive work is “the story of an exploitative industry based on taking advantage of global economic inequality, doing harm and then not taking responsibility because the Companies can do that.” Like, ‘Well, we never hired so-and-so, that was, you know, the third party,’” she said.
In addition, the mental health care provided may not be “the best of the best,” and concerns have been raised about the confidentiality of therapy, said Roberts, associate professor of information studies.
The difference in the court process in Kenya, she said, is that the moderators organized and took action against their terms, giving them unusual visibility. The usual tactic in such cases in the US is to reach a settlement, she said, but “when cases are filed in other places, it may not be as easy for the companies.”
Facebook invested in moderation centers around the world after it was accused of allowing hate speech in countries like Ethiopia and Myanmar, where conflicts have killed thousands and harmful content has been posted in various local languages.
In demand for their fluency in various African languages, content presenters hired by Sama in Kenya were soon faced with graphic content that came painfully close.
The two years that Fasica Gebrekidan worked as a presenter roughly coincided with the war in the northern Tigray region of her native Ethiopia, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed and many Tigrayans like her knew little of the fate of their loved ones.
Already suffering from fleeing the conflict, the 28-year-old spent her workday watching “cruel” videos and other content mostly war-related, including rape. For videos, she had to look at the first 50 seconds and the last 50 seconds to make a decision on whether the video should be removed.
The sense of gratitude she felt when she got the job quickly faded.
“You run away from the war, then you have to see the war,” said Fasica. “It was just torture for us.”
She now has no income and no permanent residence. She said she would seek new opportunities if only she could feel normal again. As a former journalist, she can no longer bring herself to write, even as an expression of her feelings.
Fasica fears “this junk” will stay in her head forever. Speaking to the AP, she kept an eye on a painting on the other side of the cafe, which featured something deep red that appeared to depict a man in distress. It bothered her.
Fasica blames Facebook for the lack of mental health care and pay, and accuses the local contractor of exploiting and firing her.
“Facebook should know what’s going on,” she said. “You should take care of us.”
The fate of the moderators’ complaint lies with the Kenyan court. The next hearing will take place on July 10th.
The uncertainty is frustrating, Fasica said. Some moderators give up and return to their home countries, but that is not an option for them.
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AP business journalist Kelvin Chan contributed from London.