Moderator Inside Facebook's African 'Sweatshop' Says Work Is 'Mental Torture'

A company that moderates content for Facebook, owned by Meta Platforms Inc FB, stands accused by employees of “mental torture” and underpayment.

What Happened: Sama, which moderates content for the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media platform Facebook, is facing employee attrition due to poor pay and working conditions, reported Time.

“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture,” a Facebook content moderator told Time.

“Whatever I am living on is hand-to-mouth. I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I want to resign. But then I ask myself: what will my baby eat?”

Sama houses more than 200 young employees in a building in Nairobi, Kenya where they moderate videos of murders, rapes, suicides and child sexual abuse, as per Time.

Some of the employees are paid as little as $1.50 per hour, according to Time’s investigation. Sama’s late founder Leila Janah defended the wages.

“One thing that’s critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labor markets,” Janah told BBC in 2018.

“If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off.”

An employee that reached out to a Facebook employee directly via email was reportedly fired by Sama. That employee told Time that Facebook informed Sama about the contact.

A Facebook spokesperson said the email’s recipient had followed protocol, according to the report. 

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Why It Matters: The company’s Nairobi office also moderates content for Facebook in Ethiopia, a country in midst of a civil war. Facebook is reportedly trying to curb content from inciting violence there.

Workers allege Sama suppressed efforts to improve their working conditions and fired the leader of an attempted strike — Daniel Motaung.

Motaung, a South African, consequently lost his Kenyan work permit and had to return back to his country, according to the Time report.

Sama denied there was any strike or labor action and said it valued its employees and the “long-standing work we have done to create an ethical AI supply chain.”

The company told Time that it paid its employees substantially higher wages than Kenya's minimum wage. 

Earlier in April, a Facebook moderator made scathing allegations of trauma faced by such workers.

Last year, final approval was granted for a $52 million class-action settlement on behalf of content moderators who work as contractors for Facebook in the United States.

The settlement provided for workplace changes designed to mitigate psychological harm caused by routinely viewing objectionable conduct, according to a statement from the Joseph Saveri Law Firm.

Almost all employees that Time talked with said they were emotionally affected by the content they were exposed to at Sama. 

Price Action: On Monday, Facebook shares closed 0.8% lower at $217.70 in the regular session. The shares rose 0.2% in the after-hours trading. 

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