You may have read about the trauma afflicting American workers who do content moderation for tech companies. But these days, moderation work—and, thus, the aforementioned trauma—is increasingly being outsourced. In fact, it’s being sold as a way to help people climb out of poverty:
For companies like Sama, the conditions here were ripe for investment by 2015, when the firm established a business presence in Nairobi. Headquartered in San Francisco, the self-described “ethical AI” company aims to “provide individuals from marginalized communities with training and connections to dignified digital work.” In Nairobi, it has drawn its labor from residents of the city’s informal settlements, including 500 workers from Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. In an email, a Sama spokesperson confirmed moderators in Kenya made between $1.46 and $3.74 per hour after taxes.
Grace Mutung’u, a Nairobi-based digital rights researcher at Open Society Foundations, put this into local context for me. On the surface, working for a place like Sama seemed like a huge step up for young people from the slums, many of whom had family roots in factory work. It was less physically demanding and more lucrative. Compared to manual labor, content moderation “looked very dignified,” Mutung’u said. She recalled speaking with newly hired moderators at an informal settlement near the company’s headquarters. Unlike their parents, many of them were high school graduates, thanks to a government initiative in the mid-2000s to get more kids in school.
“These kids were just telling me how being hired by Sama was the dream come true,” Mutung’u told me. “We are getting proper jobs, our education matters.” These younger workers, Mutung’u continued, “thought: ‘We made it in life.’” They thought they had left behind the poverty and grinding jobs that wore down their parents’ bodies. Until, she added, “the mental health issues started eating them up.”
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