36 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
It was early 2019, and Sama had re-
cently won a contract to provide content
moderation for Facebook’s sub-Saharan
Africa markets. Sama placed job ads in
countries across Africa—directly and
through agencies—looking for people
with fluency in various African lan-
guages to relocate to Kenya.
Motaung, like many other modera-
tors TIME spoke with, says he had little
idea what content moderation involved
when he applied for the job. He thought
it simply involved removing false infor-
mation from social media. He says he
wasn’t told during his interview that
the job would require regularly view-
ing disturbing content that could lead
to mental-health problems. After he
accepted and arrived in Kenya, Sama
asked him to sign a non disclosure agree-
ment (NDA), only then revealing to him
the type of content he would be work-
ing with daily. By then, he felt it was too
late to turn back.
Several other content moderators de-
scribed similar experiences. Two, from
separate countries, said they had an-
swered job ads placed by agencies for
“call center agents.”
Elsewhere in the world, similar
working conditions have landed Face-
book in hot water. In 2020, the social
network paid out $52 million to fund
mental-health treatment for some of its
American content moderators following
a lawsuit centered on mental ill health
stemming from their work, including
PTSD. In the U.S. and Europe, many
Facebook content moderators em-
ployed by outsourcing firm Accenture
are now asked to sign a waiver before
they begin their jobs, acknowledging
that they may develop PTSD and other
mental- health disorders. African con-
tent moderators working for Sama say
they are not asked to sign such a waiver.
According to pAy slips seen by
TIME, Sama pays foreign employ-
ees monthly pretax salaries of around
60,000 Kenyan shillings ($528), which
includes a monthly bonus for relocat-
ing from elsewhere in Africa. After tax,
this equates to around $440 per month,
or a take-home wage of roughly $2.20
per hour, based on a 45-hour work-
week. Sama employees from within
Kenya, who are not paid the monthly
relocation bonus, receive a take-home
wage equivalent to around $1.46 per
hour after tax. In an interview with the
BBC in 2018, Sama’s late founder Leila
Janah attempted to justify the compa-
ny’s levels of pay in the region. “One
thing that’s critical in our line of work is
to not pay wages that would distort local
labor markets,” she said. “If we were to
pay people substantially more than that,
we would throw everything of.”
Employees didn’t see it that way.
One day in July 2019, Motaung got
talking to a group of other moderators
who had been hired four months pre-
viously. He recounts that many said
they felt the job that they had applied
for was not the one they were doing,
and discussed their low pay and poor
working environment. Some said they
had done research that showed content
moderators in other countries were
being paid far more for the same work.
(The typical starting wage for a Face-
book content moderator in the U.S. is
around $18 per hour.) They resolved to
group together and take action to bet-
ter their conditions. Motaung took the
lead, and he and his colleagues created
a WhatsApp group chat to begin can-
vassing opinion more widely. It soon
had more than 100 members.
Based on the discussions in the chat,
Motaung drafted a petition with a list
of demands for Sama’s management, in-
cluding that everyone’s pay be doubled.
The document, seen by TIME, said that
if management did not “substantively
engage” with the demands within seven
days, employees would go on strike.
Motaung knew that Sama employees
stood a better chance of having their de-
mands met by acting as a group, because
Sama was dependent on “the client”:
Facebook. If they all stopped working
at once, he reasoned, Facebook would
want to know why so much of its Africancontent was no longer being moderated,
and could put significant pressure on
Sama to accede to workers’ demands.
“I explained that alone, all of us are
expendable,” he recalls telling his col-
leagues. “They have a contract with the
client. The terms of the contract are that
[Sama is] to deliver on a regular basis,
no interruptions whatsoever. We knew
if all of us stopped working right now,
they would not be able to replace us
within a week or within a month.”
The Alliance, as the group of em-
ployees began calling themselves, pre-
sented their petition to Sama’s man-
agement in a meeting on July 30, 2019.
Two senior Sama executives from San
Francisco joined via video conference,
but they dismissed the workers’ con-
cerns, according to Motaung and others.
“They told us there are lots of people