Sama, Meta’s largest content moderation provider in Africa for monitoring dangerous content on Meta’s platforms, has declared that it will stop providing services to the tech giant and shut down its center in the area. The deal was terminated, according to Meta.
This emerged a year after an exposé of Sama’s office in Nairobi, Kenya, and its cruel treatment of African contract workers.
Sama is closing due to the poor economy, according to the official announcement. The startup hopes to specialize in computer vision data annotation.
We appreciate Sama’s choice to discontinue its content screening services for social networking sites. In order to prevent any effects on our capacity to review content during this transition, we will collaborate with our partners.
In order to help with data labelling and AI training, the tech giant hired a content moderation service provider in 2017. However, during the past two years, the Nairobi office has been active in monitoring and censoring some of the most offensive and graphic content on Meta’s platforms.
Read also: Meta is laying off more than 11,000 employees
Sama’s and Meta’s charges
Meta and Sama, the subcontractor, have encountered numerous legal challenges as a result of their content filtering practices, working culture, and disregard for the mental health of their employees.
Daniel Motaung, a former employee, filed a lawsuit against Sama in 2021, alleging that both firms neglected mental health care for moderators and failed to educate them about the nature of the job. By various activist groups, the firms were also sued for many violations of the Kenyan constitution.
Meta, Facebook’s parent corporation, was sued in Kenya’s High Court for $2 billion in 2022 for allegedly fostering hate speech, inciting ethnic violence, and failing to monitor content in Eastern and Southern Africa.
What about the workforce?
Meta will hire 1,500 of Sama’s personnel to work with the new data labeling contractor, leaving 200 staff members unemployed. The IT behemoth fired nearly 11,000 workers in the fourth quarter of 2022.
According to Sama, affected employees will receive severance compensation and 12 months of support.
Who will manage the content? Majorel of Luxembourg will handle the deal, according to reports. TikTok’s African moderating services were provided by the business.
But according to Cori Crider, co-director of Foxglove, a legal NGO that is backing Motaung’s action against Sama and Meta, the company that would be taking over Sama’s contract with Meta has harsher working conditions for its employees.
According to her, there is no adequate mental health support, and the base pay appears to be just about half as low as Sama’s meager income. But Meta hasn’t said anything about Majorel taking up the content moderation responsibilities.