**1,100 Kenyan Workers Tossed Aside as Meta Cuts Ties with Sama After Years of Exploitation Lawsuits**

More than 1,100 workers in Nairobi, Kenya are about to lose their jobs after Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — ended its contract with the outsourcing firm Sama. The layoffs, confirmed by Sama in a statement this week, come after years of lawsuits and international scrutiny over how those workers were treated. These were not desk jobs reviewing spreadsheets. Many of these workers spent years staring at the worst content the internet produces — beheadings, child sexual abuse, suicides — for eight hours a day or more, so that billions of people scrolling Facebook and Instagram would never have to see it.

Meta and Sama have been fighting in Kenyan courts since 2022. A former content moderator named Daniel Motaung filed the first lawsuit alleging that working conditions violated Kenya's constitution. He said he was not told before being hired that the job would involve constant exposure to graphic violence and trauma. In 2023, roughly 200 more former moderators sued Sama directly, accusing the company of exploitation through low wages, punishing hours, and inadequate mental health support. Sama defended itself by claiming it paid four times the local minimum wage and offered unlimited mental health resources. The workers and their advocates told a different story.

The relationship between Meta and Sama runs deep. Sama — originally founded in 2008 as Samasource by the late entrepreneur Leila Janah — was built on the stated mission of lifting people out of poverty through digital work. The company became Meta's flagship outsourcing operation in Africa, handling content moderation across the continent. But what was sold as opportunity looked more like a pipeline: recruit workers in countries where labor is cheap, put them through psychological hell reviewing the most disturbing content on the planet, bind them with strict non-disclosure agreements that prevented them from telling even their own families what they saw, and pay them a fraction of what the work would cost in the United States or Europe.

After the lawsuits mounted and advocacy groups like the UK-based Foxglove campaign publicly exposed the conditions, Sama pulled back from content moderation entirely and shifted to AI data labeling — tagging and annotating images, text, and video to train Meta's artificial intelligence systems. But that work came with its own problems. A Swedish investigation revealed that Sama workers in Nairobi were reviewing footage captured by Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses — footage that included people using the bathroom, having sex, and other deeply private moments — to help train Meta's AI. Meta faces a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. over those revelations.

Now Meta has cut the cord completely. The contract termination leaves over 1,100 people unemployed in a city where those jobs, even at exploitative wages, represented a rare foothold in the formal economy. Former workers have described lasting psychological damage from years of moderation work. One ex-moderator told the press: "You can imagine watching graphic stuff like suicide videos for four years, what it does to you." The non-disclosure agreements many signed mean they cannot freely discuss what they endured, making it harder to seek proper treatment or even explain the gaps in their employment.

This is part of a larger pattern. Meta is now deploying its own AI systems to handle content moderation at scale, bragging that its automated tools can catch twice as much violating content with 60 percent fewer errors than human reviewers. The company is also planning to cut as many as 8,000 of its own employees globally in a restructuring tied to AI. The message is plain: the human beings who built the training data, who absorbed the trauma, who made the AI possible in the first place, are now being replaced by the very technology their labor created. The workers were the raw material, and now that the machine is built, the material gets thrown away.

The broader picture for Africa is this: Silicon Valley has turned the continent into a labor extraction zone for its most dangerous and lowest-paid digital work. Content moderation, data annotation, AI training — the unglamorous backbone of every major tech platform — is disproportionately done by workers in Kenya, the Philippines, India, and other nations in the Global South. The companies profit in the hundreds of billions. The workers get a few dollars an hour, psychological trauma, and a layoff notice when the algorithms get good enough. For Black communities worldwide watching this unfold, the pattern is not new. The technology changes. The extraction does not.