The Kenyan High Court has issued an order prohibiting Meta, Facebook’s parent company, from using any third-party content moderator company other than Sama to examine its platform’s content.
The order comes after Meta disobeyed earlier orders to solely work with Sama as its content reviewer until the case about Sama’s working conditions was heard. Meta had gone against the order and employed unnamed “global partners” to handle its content moderation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Last year, Sama was accused of treating its content moderators poorly and illegally firing some. Amidst these allegations, Sama announced that its agreement with Meta expired on March 31, 2023. It also shut down its content moderation division to focus on labelling—computer vision data annotation.
Due to these changes, Sama planned to lay off over 200 moderators but hasn’t been able to do so due to court orders stemming from the lawsuits concerning its contract with Meta. So even though it has no content moderation going on, Sama is still paying its content moderators, which it claims have been on paid leave since April.
Meta hired Majorel, a different content moderation company, to replace Sama. However, Meta can’t work with Majorel due to court orders to work with only Sama. The lawsuit also accuses Majorel of refusing to employ moderators who used to work with Sama. Majorel argues that this court decision would waste the investment they made in setting up a hub in Kenya in 2022.
At the moment of writing this, Meta has not disclosed who its new content moderators are. So far, there’s nothing indicating Meta will not ignore this order the same way it disregarded the earlier one.
