2023-05-23 17:03:19
“Anything worse you can imagine, I watched and moderated. I was unprepared for what I saw. » It’s difficult, when talking with Daniel Motaung, to imagine the ghosts that now populate his imagination. Beheadings, rape of children, human sacrifices… Behind the screen, in an office in Nairobi (Kenya), this 27-year-old South African in 2019 was confronted, for six months, with the darkest corners of Facebook. Its objective: that no problematic video ends up online. He still suffers from post-traumatic stress.
Content moderators – or “data taggers” for artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT – are responsible for identifying obscene videos or violent texts on social networks. In Kenya, these shadow workers are paid less than $2 per hour. The subcontractor that employed Daniel Motaung is a Californian company called Sama, well established in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nearly four years after leaving the company, the 30-year-old returned to Nairobi in early May. But it was neither to return to service nor to attend one of the hearings in the lawsuit he filed against Facebook and Sama a year earlier. A happier event awaited him in this megalopolis near the equator, 4,000 km north of his home in South Africa: the creation of a union. The 150 content moderators who compose it are Ethiopian, Burundian, Algerian… All work from Nairobi on behalf of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and ChatGPT.
toxic culture
Facebook alone has 15,000 content moderators around the world, most of them in the United States. Yet it was in Kenya that these workers were the first to unite. “Probably because that’s where the working conditions are the hardest”explains Tom Hegarty, of the NGO Foxglove, specialized in technological justice and based in the United Kingdom. “In addition to the very low pay, there is a whole toxic culture: the vagueness that often surrounds the nature of the position when recruiting, the confidentiality clauses that impose silence, the permanent fear of losing one’s work permit and to be sent back to his country…”
As well as the virtual impossibility, at least so far, of unionizing. Daniel Motaung came up against it in July 2019. He had then graduated two years ago, in law and political science, and had been a content moderator for five months, after responding to an online ad from Sama seeking speakers. Zulu. “I needed the money”, he confides. Indignant by the brutality of the work and the derisory psychological support, the one who imagined himself a lawyer for a time becomes the spokesperson for his colleagues in pain. They unite in a group, Alliance, which will not have time to become a union.
A trial to “create a precedent”
“I understood that Facebook couldn’t do without us. Without content moderation, no advertiser would want to advertise on the platform, which would lose revenue. » But subcontractor Sama proves to be more inflexible than Daniel Motaung anticipated. The petition by which he and his colleagues ask for better wages, threatening to go on strike within seven days, does not have the expected posterity. “Before the end of the seven days, I was suspended”, says its initiator. Three weeks later, Sama fires him for “bullying, harassment and coercion”.
Back home, the young South African almost sinks. Isolated, he can’t tell anyone about the shocking images that still haunt him, fearing he might breach a confidentiality clause. As for seeing a psychologist, he can’t afford it. Suicidal thoughts plague him. “At that time, I had the choice between life and death. I have chosen “, he simply explains.
In February 2022, his story made the front page of the American weekly Time. At the same time, Daniel Motaung meets the NGO Foxglove. This encourages him to file a complaint against Sama and Facebook, in order to create a precedent for “Forcing these companies to finally treat their content moderators with respect”. In May 2022, the trial opens in Nairobi. A year later, the long-awaited union was created on Labor Day. “This profession must become more professional, with special training and qualificationsinsists Daniel Motaung. This is the only way to avoid exploitation. »
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His compass: The strength of union
“Quickly after my hiring, in 2019, I knew that the priority was to unite us, the content moderators. I told my colleagues that alone we were much more vulnerable than collectively. My strategy: if our bosses tried to remove one of us, we would all stop working. Facebook would then want to know why some of its African content was no longer moderated, and would pressure Sama to get the company to comply with our demands.
My mistake was to believe that my colleagues would not crack under pressure. When one is poor, one submits. I hope that this new union will protect us from this fragility. »
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