Meta outsources the most brutal digital labor to Africa and profits from workers’ pain.
Two statements of fact.
Corporations are not your friend. The price of the virtual on the physical and mental well-being of those who service it is extraordinarily high.
A recent piece by Sonia Kgomo the Guardian (UK) explains and expands upon those statements. An organizer with African Tech Workers Rising, Kgomo spoke at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit held in Paris on February 10-11. Responding to billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking on Meta, Kgomo has a message for the world: Don’t.
As a former FB moderator in Kenya, Kgomo knows what she’s talking about. This is the conclusion she shared at the AI Action Summit: “Instead of scaling back programmes that make social media and artificial intelligence more trustworthy, companies need to invest in and respect the people who filter social media and who label the data that AI relies on.”
If you read Kgomo’s article you’ll know exactly why she recommends this. Not only was she asked to examine material containing “child abuse, human mutilation, racist attacks and the darkest parts of the internet” – she was expected to work a ten-hour day with no breaks.
That’s right. No breaks. Not one. No lunch break. No bathroom break. No mental health counseling to help employees deal with extended exposure to vicious, ugly, and traumatizing material. Nothing. The sheer quantity of material she and her fellow workers had to view and evaluate only exacerbated the problem. Kgomo spent two years in the sewers of the internet, and things have deteriorated since she left. The workload has increased. The pay has not.
It’s not just an issue with Meta, Kgomo writes; exploitative working conditions exist throughout the tech world.
Meta may not be the only offender, but its corporate behavior has resulted in three lawsuits in Kenya. As The Economist reports, all three “concern the invisible army of moderators used by tech firms to cleanse their platforms of violent or illegal content. Together the cases illuminate the grim reality for low-paid African workers of the global tech boom.”
They also point out that moderators aren’t the only ones who get hurt. In October 2021 an Ethiopian chemistry professor’s name, photo, and place of employment were posted on Facebook along with a claim that he was connected to anti-government rebels. His son tried to have that material pulled. Meta refused. The professor was murdered in November 2021.
Though the murder took place in Ethiopia, the Facebook moderators were based in Kenya – hence the lawsuit there. If Meta can be sued in Africa, can it be sued elsewhere?
Meta hopes not. Labor in Africa is – now, at rate – dirt-cheap, and they’d prefer to keep it that way. After all, what’s a little murder and mayhem among friends?
But as I said at the top: corporations are not our friends. Zuckerberg, et alia, care nothing for us and, if they have their way, will do nothing for us. As Sonia Kgomo wrote in the Guardian, that’s how the tech world rolls. Its business model revolves around “outsourcing the most brutal digital labour and profiting from our pain.”
