The men and women tasked with keeping social media safe have been exposed to horrific images and videos for years, a situation that has now sparked a Sh25.9 billion class action lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta and its local agents.
In new details filed in the Employment and Labour Relations Court, the 185 Facebook content moderators have shown how exposure to graphic social media content such as terrorism, child sexual abuse, and murder has exposed them to mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD).
A medic who examined 140 content moderators said they were exposed to extremely graphic content on a daily basis including videos of gruesome murders, self-harm, suicides, attempted suicides, sexual violence, explicit sexual content, physical and sexual abuse of children and horrific acts of violence.
“That in my professional opinion, many of them were still in a precarious emotional state despite having stopped Facebook content moderation about a whole year before the examination took place,” Dr Ian Kanyanya, a senior medical specialist in psychiatry, said in an affidavit supporting the case.
The content moderators are seeking compensation of Sh50 million each for causing them mental distress.
They also claim to have been subjected to forced labour and modern slavery, for which they are seeking Sh20 million each for alleged unfair labour practices.
The 185 petitioners are also seeking Sh10 million each as aggravated damages for allegedly being discriminated against in the course of their employment.
Dr Kanyanya says in the affidavit that the content moderators were required to deal with large numbers of tickets depicting nudity and pornography, and that some of the tickets also depicted sexual violence against children and adults.
He said that one of the requirements during recruitment was to hire young people from marginalised areas, and that many of them were naive before becoming Facebook content moderators, so flagging the graphic images and videos was their first exposure to sexual content.
The doctor added that the moderators reported that they were expected to review the graphic content for eight consecutive hours in a day, and on some days this would go up to 10 hours.
“That further, many of them cried during the sessions and appeared to be re-traumatised when they spoke about what they had encounter,” Dr Kanyanya said.
The social media giant had argued that the content moderators could not pursue the claim against the company because Meta was not based in Kenya.
The petitioners said they were experiencing symptoms of insomnia, hallucinations, depression, paranoia, panic attacks, anxiety, flashbacks and nightmares of graphic tickets that had been posted.
They said they understood that the work they were doing was important to their communities at home, including preventing children from seeing toxic content, preventing families from seeing the injured and dead bodies of their loved ones online, and reporting crimes in progress.
For some, the petition added, it was better for them to suffer than to expose their fellow community members to being trafficked into forced labour, as they had experienced.
Some of the former employees of Samasource Kenya EPZ Ltd, which had been contracted by Meta, were migrant workers, and they claimed that they were under immense pressure to pack up their lives from their home countries.
They said they had a reasonable expectation that they would be granted work permits and that their work permits would be renewed.
They claim that they were brought into the country on a special pass (business visa) instead of a work permit.
And upon arrival in Kenya, they were allegedly placed in dormitories where they had to share living quarters with strangers.
“Male migrant petitioners were forced to live in the same house as female migrant petitioners. This also applied to Muslim migrant petitioners whose religion prohibits such living arrangements,” the petition stated.
Apart from compensation of Sh140 million each, the migrant content moderators want a declaration that the manner in which they were recruited by Meta Platforms, Meta Platforms Ireland and Sama and brought to Kenya amounted to human trafficking for forced labour.
“An order that all the damages be payable jointly and severally against the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Respondents and with interest at court rates from the date of filing of this Further Amended Petition until payment in full,” the prayed in the petition.
