Facebook Faces Legal Action in Kenya over Poor Working Conditions at Nairobi Office

A former Facebook employee stationed at the Nairobi office has threatened to sue the parent company Meta for wrongful termination of his contract.

Daniel Motaung, who worked as a content moderator for the social media platform, claims he was sacked for questioning working conditions at the Nairobi office.

Alongside his 100 co-workers, Motaung says he was trying to form a trade union to protest exploitative working conditions but he was fired.

Through his lawyers, Motaung on Tuesday sent a demand letter to Meta and Sama, a San Francisco-based Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) company that provides content moderation services for Facebook in Nairobi.

He notified the two companies of the impending legal suit for violating the rights of Kenyan and international workers, arguing that they have a constitutional right to form a union.

“Content moderators like Daniel are the most important and least-discussed aspect of Facebook’s global operations. Their job is to sift through the social media posts of Facebook’s nearly three billion monthly users and remove posts that violate its rules–such as graphic violence, hate, and misinformation,” the letter reads in part as quoted by Nation.

The lawyers argue that the nature of the work poses a health risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which remains unaddressed.

“Facebook subcontracts most of this work to companies like Sama – a practice that keeps Facebook’s profit margins high but at the cost of thousands of moderators’ health – and the safety of Facebook worldwide. Sama moderators report ongoing violations, including conditions which are unsafe, degrading, and pose a risk of PTSD.”

Motaung accuses Sama of participating in unlawful “union-busting action”, which included sending a top executive from the US to kill the fledgling union.

The workers have given Facebook 21 days to address 12 demands of fair treatment failure to which they will take a legal action.