writes Eunice Akello
Africa-Press – Uganda. Governments are keen to tap into new opportunities to create jobs, but many of the employment practices linked with content moderation are exploitative.
While it is undeniable that Big Tech companies address employment gaps, the unjust practices that emerge from their operations reflect the power imbalance between them and their African employers and subcontractors. META, the owner of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is currently at the forefront of this debate in Africa. Labour exploitation concerns have emerged from Meta’s outsourced operations in Kenya and Ghana and are currently being tried in court. These lawsuits portray the reality of content moderators caught at the crossroads between competing state interests to expand labour employment opportunities for their citizens, and Big Tech’s business interests in their countries of operation.
Youth unemployment
Many African youths complete their education cycle and meet the sobering reality that the employment sector cannot absorb them. According to a 2024 International Labour Organisation report, the unemployment rate of youth in Sub-Saharan Africa was 21.9 per cent in 2023. One solution to the unemployment problem has been to embrace alternative sources of employment, such as the expansion of the labour market to include non-national actors through Business Process Outsourcing for global companies. Since many youths are equipped with knowledge and skills in information communication and technology, working for big tech companies (or in this instance working for companies that work for Big Tech companies) is an attractive employment opportunity.
By ‘Big Tech’, we are referring primarily to US-based companies that provide digital services such as search engines, social media, e-commerce, and cloud computing. Although not responsible for content published on their platforms, many employ content moderators to remove illegal or viciously harmful content from view.
The act of content moderation involves people who are employed to view and make decisions regarding the various types of social media posts uploaded by users of an online platform. The process aims to ensure compliance of such posts with the user-community rules, guidelines, and legal requirements. Doing so seeks to balance between users’ freedom of expression and the need to respect the various ethical requirements of a safe online environment. By its very nature, much of the content is extremely distressing to see.
META in Kenya and Ghana
To aid their content moderation operations in Africa, Meta engaged Samasource. The company recruited and managed content moderators working for Meta in Kenya. Mercy Mutemi, as lead counsel, filed a lawsuit seeking to have Meta tried in Kenya for the harm done to its content moderators. The lawsuit seeks redress for content moderators working through Samasource. As the legal process in Kenya was ongoing, Samasource relocated to Ghana, where similar issues of exploitation of content moderation emerged at Meta in Ghana. The Kenyan government also used diplomatic engagement to tackle the labour exploitation concerns of content moderators. Although the diplomatic negotiations between the company and the government of Kenya suggest that foreign companies should not be tried in Kenya in the future, they have not stopped the ongoing legal processes.
Public concerns regarding the operations of META in Kenya and Ghana are indicative of the realisation that digital employment hides many ethical concerns, as states seek a balance between bridging employment gaps and protecting the labour of those employed in the digital sector.
Responsibility for the affected moderators and general citizens triggers multiple paradoxical questions: what moral obligation do states have towards ensuring the protection of their citizens against the negative impacts of foreign direct investment? How can employees be guarded against being hired under false pretences? What should be the trade-off between attracting investment and its attendant reduction of unemployment problems when weighed against the risks experienced by those recruited for some forms of work? It is hoped that the outcomes of the lawsuit will provide some of the answers to such questions.
The case between Kenya and Meta is indicative of the expanding agency of people on the African continent in seeking justice for its nationals who are the victims of Big Tech companies’ practices. The progress made so far is also indicative of the ability of societies in the global south to put their national interests first amidst complex geopolitical environments in which the global political economy exists.
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