cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4455823
Kenya is hosting unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc., the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mercy Mutemi, who made last year’s TIME 100 list, is a Nairobi-based lawyer who is leading the cases. She spends her days thinking about what our consumption of digital products should look like in the next 10 years. Will it be extractive and extortionist, or will it be beneficial? What does it look like from an African perspective?
Question: Behind the legal battle with Meta are workers and their conditions. What challenges do they face in these tech roles, particularly content moderation?
Mercy Mutemi: Content moderators in Kenya face horrendous conditions. They’re often misled about the nature of the work, not warned that the work is going to be dangerous for them. There’s no adequate care provided to look after these workers, and they’re not paid well enough. And they’ve created this ecosystem of fear — it’s almost like this special Stockholm syndrome has been created where you know what you’re going through is really bad, but you’re so afraid of the NDA that you just would rather not speak up.
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Content moderation work, annotation work, and algorithm training, […] in its very nature involves a lot of exposure to harmful content. That work is dumped on Kenya. Kenya says it’s interested in digital development, but what Kenya ends up getting is work that poses serious risks, rather than meaningful investment in its people or infrastructure.
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When the initial version of ChatGPT was released, it had lots of sexual violence in it. So to clean up an algorithm like that, you just teach it all the worst kinds of sexual violence […] if you ask ChatGPT to show you the worst rape that could ever happen, there are now metrics in place that tell it not to give out this information because it’s been taught to recognize what it’s being asked for. And that’s thanks to Kenyan youth whose mental health is now toast, and whose life has been compromised completely
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Big Tech is not planting any roots in the country [of Kenya] when it comes to hiring people to moderate content or train algorithms for AI. They’re not really investing in the country in the sense that there’s no actual person to hold liable should anything go south. There’s no registered office in Kenya for companies like Meta, TikTok, OpenAI.
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Instead, what you have are these middlemen. They’re called Business Process Outsourcing, or BPOs […] It’s almost like they’re agents of big tech companies. So they will do big tech’s bidding. If the big tech says jump, then they jump. So we find ourselves in this situation where these companies purely exist for the cover of escaping liability.
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[The workers’] mental health is destroyed – and there are often no measures in place to protect their well-being or respect them as workers. And then it’s their job to figure out how to get out of that rut because they still are a breadwinner in an African context, and they still have to work, right? And in this community where mental health isn’t the most spoken-about thing, how do you explain to your parents that you can’t work?
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I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can’t work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn’t look like lifting people out of poverty to me. That looks like entrenching the problem further because you’ve destroyed not just one person.
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MM: Let me just be very categorical. My position is not that this work shouldn’t be coming into Kenya. But it can’t be the way it is now, where companies get to say “either you take our work and take it as horrible as it is with no care, and we exploit you to our satisfaction, or we, or we leave.” No. You can have dangerous work done in Kenya, but with appropriate level of care, with respect, and upholding the rights of these workers. It’s going to be a long journey to achieve justice.
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[Edit typo.]
Hey there, I’ve removed this comment because it reads as rather aggressive (and was reported for such). Maybe take a step back and re-assess if you’re treating others with good faith and be(e)ing nice.
FYI- there is wide overlap between these two and they are not mutually exclusive. If you’re unfamiliar with the use of these terms, you should ask how they are defined or how they are being used, rather than pushing a pedantic lens on the words definition.
I know exactly how the terms are, and I know there is overlap in the exploitation game.
None of what is going on in the article is about colonialism
Also it’s extremely rude and condescending to talk down to others like you just did.
https://feddit.org/u/[email protected]
This is apparently not the case. The ‘exploitation game’ is not unique to any of form of capitalism (there are many) as there has been exploitation of large groups of people also in the pre-industrial feudal system, just to name an example.
Unfortunately, we see similar over-simplified narratives all over the web spaces, also on the Fediverse. This is not a grave issue in itself, we all can be mistaken, but very often these narratives are communicated in a very dogmatic and offensive way. This is unnecessary and not very smart, especially as you are wrong here.
This is literally a company employing people, it is capitalist exploitation.
I understand. You are right and everyone else is wrong. Classic.
Ah yes compared to you being right?
If all you’ve got left to say are little quips, I’m going to stop this conversation here as it’s a waste of my time.
My dude, I told you to chill and take a step back. People were reporting you for being confrontational. I flagged my comment to help you understand that this was me helping you understand how we do things on Beehaw. If you think someone reminding you of the rules, asking you to take a step back, asking you to not be confrontational and doing their best to treat your comment with good faith and providing you educational material is “rude and condescending” or that it is “talking down to others” then you’re probably not a good fit for this instance.
I’m going to time you out from our instance for 7 days. Please take that time to reflect. If you repeatedly show this behavior on our instance, you may find yourself with longer timeouts or even being removed.