The social media giant Meta and its two Kenyan partners in content moderation, Sama and Majorel, are the targets of a new lawsuit that was filed in that country.
In a petition submitted today, 43 content moderators accuse Sama of engaging in “unlawful firing.”
Sama’s employment with Meta will end this month, despite the fact that the company made the decision to close its content review division in January.
Also, they are retaliating against Majorel, Meta’s new partner in content monitoring, for what they perceive to be biased.
They claim that Majorel has placed all of Sama’s former employees on a blacklist.
The moderators claim Sama wrongfully terminated their employment and failed to give them any redundancy notices before their dismissal in a lawsuit they filed in a court with jurisdiction over employment and labour relations.
According to the lawsuit, among other things, the moderators were not provided with the thirty days’ notice of termination that Kenyan law mandates, and they were only paid in full after agreeing to nondisclosure agreements.
Read also: Meta to lay off 10,000 workers after laying off 11,000 in 2022
What Is Meta Sued For?
According to reports, Meta has also instructed its new Luxembourg-based partner, Majorel, to ban content moderators who formerly worked for Sama. Moderator applicants who had previously worked for Sama were “denied on the basis that they previously worked at the 3rd Respondent’s (Sama’s) premises,” the document read.
There is legal paperwork claiming that some of the 260 affected Sama content moderators were recruited from different countries in Africa. After March 31st, when their contracts with Sama end, these people will be forced to leave Kenya if they are unable to find other jobs.
“This is a sham mass layoff of workers that is really an attempt to undermine unions. For example, Cori Crider, director of the tech justice NGO Foxglove, which is providing support for the case, has said, “You can’t just switch suppliers and instruct recruiters not to hire your workers because they are “troublemakers” — that is, because they have the audacity to speak up for themselves.”
Sama, whose customer roster is broad and includes OpenAI, cancelled its contract with Meta and stopped providing content review services in 2022 after it was threatened by a lawsuit filed in Kenya by its former content moderator, Daniel Motaung (computer vision data annotation).
Motuang, a South African, has accused Sama and Meta of several wrongdoings, including human trafficking, unjust labour relations, union busting, and a lack of “adequate” mental health and psychosocial treatment for its employees. Employees at Sama claim he was fired in 2019 for trying to unionise them and call for a walkout.
Meta is being sued for the third time in Kenya. This follows a similar action filed in December by Ethiopians who claimed Facebook’s lack of adequate safety safeguards contributed to the violence that ultimately cost the lives of 500,000 Ethiopians (including the petitioner’s father) during the just concluded Tigray War.
The lawsuit claims that the social network actively pushed inflammatory information and did not employ enough people who spoke the local languages to monitor and moderate the site’s content adequately.