About 43 Facebook content moderators in Kenya who were released in January are to sue the social media behemoth’s parent Meta for unjust release, according to a statement published on their behalf Monday.
Meta is seeking to slash its workforce by about a quarter within six months as the tech sector survives bumpy times with Facebook, which became Meta in late 2021, notably fighting a deceleration in online advertising.
The statement said as in January about 260 content moderators working at Facebook’s moderation hub in Nairobi, Kenya, were told that they would be made redundant by Sama, the outsourcing firm that has run the office since 2019.
Overnight, these moderators doing critical safety work for East and South Africa lost their jobs.
In the biggest legal challenge yet to Meta’s African operations, 43 moderators at Facebook’s Nairobi moderation hub are suing the social media firm and its outsourcers for sacking the entire workforce — and for blacklisting all the laid-off workers.”
The statement read
When Meta asked for a response, Meta did not immediately comment.
Last December, a Kenyan NGO, and two Ethiopian citizens filed a case in Kenya against Meta, charging the platform of not doing sufficiently to fight online hate speech, and urged the creation of a $1.6 billion fund to compensate victims.
The move claimed that Meta announced a speech that led to ethnic brutality and killings in Ethiopia by using an algorithm liable to prioritize or suggest hateful and violent content on Facebook.
