Facing disturbing content daily, online moderators in Africa want better protections and a fair wage

Trevin Brownie had to sift through a lot of disturbing content during the three years he worked as an online content moderator in Nairobi, Kenya.

“We remove any violent content that violates the policy such as bullying and harassment or hate speech or suicidal violent graphic content,” Brownie said. Now guest host Mark Kelley.

Brownie encountered content ranging from child pornography, material distributed by organized crime groups and terrorists, and images taken from war zones around the world, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I’ve seen more than 500 beheadings a month,” he said.

Brownie moved from South Africa, where he previously worked in a call center, to Nairobi, where he worked as a subcontractor for Facebook’s main moderation hub in East Africa, operated by a US company called Sama AI.

Despite the tough nature of the job, a content moderator working in Kenya says Sama AI and other third-party outsourcing companies are taking advantage of him. They say they get low wages and inadequate mental health support compared to their counterparts abroad.

Brownie said the nature of his job took a toll on his mental health. PTSD has become a common side effect he and others in the industry now live with, he said.

“It’s really traumatic. It’s disturbing, especially for a suicide video,” he said.

“Watching it certainly makes most of us, if not all, useless when it comes to emotions or feelings towards death.”

Facebook’s parent company Meta does not use Sama as an outsourcing partner. However, the two companies are currently facing multiple lawsuits in Kenya. The allegations ranged from poor working conditions, illegal dismissals after attempts to unionize, blacklisting of workers, and salary deferral for laid-off employees.

Brownie, one of 184 petitioners in one lawsuit, said he was among the former Sama AI employees laid off without paying the wages they were owed.

Meta failed attempt the challenge of their involvement in that case, on the grounds that the company does not have an official presence in the country, unlike Sama AI.

It is not the only lawsuits related to content moderation that have taken place in Kenya.

Majorel, another content moderation company operating in Africa but based in Luxembourg, was sued for discriminatory hiring practices for allegedly blacklisting Sama employees.

In a statement, Sama denied the moderator’s accusations of union rebellion, and underpaying its employees.

“We recognize that content moderation is a difficult task and have paid wages that are 4x the minimum wage and 2.5x the living wage in Kenya in recognition of the challenges of the work,” he said, adding that we pay higher wages to expatriates. live in the country.

But Brownie says that’s far from the truth. They say concerns about working conditions and pay are often brushed aside.

“What we’re trying to do is we’re one of the 10 highest paying jobs in the country,” he said.

Brownie says he earns the equivalent of $2 Cdn an hour for his work. After taxes, they take home about $500 a month. Meanwhile, he said that someone doing the same moderate job abroad can make $20 an hour.

“It’s just enough to let me live paycheque to paycheque. But because we need this job and our family back home depends on our financial support, we stay and work,” he said.

Real people are also behind AI: experts

Before May, more than 150 content moderators working on artificial intelligence (AI) systems used by Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT, from all parts of the continent, gathered in Kenya. to form the Union of African Content Moderators. It claims to be the first union in the continent.

The union is calling on companies in the industry to increase wages, provide access to on-site psychiatrists, and redraw policies to protect employees from exploitative labor practices.

In a statement, Sama said he applauded the formation of the labor union. “Sama has policies and training to support freedom of association, and if that happens, Sama will be happy to join the group,” the company said, adding: “We care deeply about the health and emotional well-being of our team.”

For Sonam Jindal, stories like Brownie’s are all too common, and holding employers accountable for their actions in foreign jurisdictions is often a challenge.

“Part of what makes this industry a little more complex and difficult is that there are many different actors and it can lead to a situation where there is limited transparency about who is actually responsible at a certain point,” Jindal, program and research leader on AI, labor, and the economy at the nonprofit group Partnership on AI, told Kelley.

“Right now, there aren’t a lot of regulations,” Jindal said.

Jindal says the main obstacle to getting better protections for content moderators is the way people think social media platforms work — and now, he says, that problem is spreading to new and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

ChatGPT, for example, has gained popularity since its launch last year, Jindal said.

“I think a lot of the narrative there is, ‘AI is great.’ We have made these technological advances… but these advances are based on labor and human input. And I need to understand how important that is.

AI platforms like ChapGPT need people like Brownie to sift through and filter data, Jindal explained, checking for inaccuracies and removing harmful content, to keep things running smoothly.

“There is no social media platform if there are no moderators to make sure that the material that is shown there is real material,” Brownie said.

While ChatGPT and other AI platforms are growing in popularity, Jindal says there is an important shift in how industry leaders do business overseas and domestically.

Partnerships in AI published a list five points recommended changes, which include paying a living wage according to location and creating a clear and organized communication mechanism between workers and managers.

Jindal said lawmakers in all jurisdictions also have an important role to play in enacting policies that protect workers from exploitative practices.

He also wants to see the UN’s International Labor Organization involved in oversight.

In the meantime, Brownie said his time in Kenya will come to an end once the litigation is over.

“I’m going back to it [South Africa] to try and rebuild my life, find my sanity, and just start over,” she said.