Content moderation

PREFACE
These are the true stories of African content moderators. My name
is Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan. I am an ex-content moderator for
Meta’s Facebook in Africa. I was recruited in March 2021 via Meta’s
subcontractor Samasource to work in Nairobi, Kenya, and was
affected by the mass lay-offs of 260 content moderators after
Meta terminated its contract with Samasource without warning in
January 2023.
Data workers, including content moderators, are often hired
under very precarious conditions, circumventing traditional labor
protections. Furthermore, the work itself is deliberately fragmented,
and companies insist it is “easy.” Thus, portrayals of data workers
as low-skill abound. These tendencies signal new labor challenges
concerning the rights of data workers, the role of large tech
companies in exploiting a deregulated system, and the need for
adequate government responses. The Data Worker’s Inquiry Project
is on a quest to bridge this gap.
Funded by DAIR, Weizenbaum Institute, and Technische Universität
Berlin, the Data Workers’ Inquiry is a project that foregrounds data
worker’s experiences and demands. The project aims to prevent
further worker violations and foster solidarity for change in the
above areas by establishing the facts and documenting the conflicts
and grievances that emerged from these “new” modes of work.
I acquired the information for this study report by interviewing my
former colleagues (ex-content moderators) and also from first-hand
observation, my lived experience. More than 15 people participated,
extensive interviews and data collection through questionnaires
and interviews were used to compile this report.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It wasn’t easy for most of the content moderators to come
forward and tell their stories as they were and are still suffering
from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other
various untreated mental and psychological issues that resulted
from watching too much harmful content in their role as moderators.
Many of the respondents volunteered in this study in the hope
that their life stories might be of assistance to others who want to
join the content moderation and data work field and also to enlighten
society regarding the experience of this hazardous job.
The names used in this report are not real names. I used
pseudonyms as the respondents chose to stay anonymous for their
safety and security. I would like to thank everyone who participated
in this study. I also would like to extend my utmost gratitude to the
Data Workers’ Inquiry project for giving us this opportunity to share
our stories with the world.
Trigger warning!
This report touches upon very detailed unpleasant events, graphic
content, explicit sexual situations, and depictions of violence and
abuse.
Therefore, readers’ discretion is advised.
Thank you!

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CONTENT MODERATION?
According to the Wikipedia page, content moderation is the
process of detecting online contributions that are irrelevant,
obscene, illegal, harmful, or insulting, in contrast to useful or
informative contributions, frequently for censorship or suppression
of opposing viewpoints. The purpose of content moderation is to
remove or apply a warning label to problematic content or allow users
to block and filter content themselves on social media platforms
and the internet.
From that description, it becomes clear why content moderation is
important: none of us want to encounter insulting or illegal content
on a daily basis. However, this description leaves out an essential
factor for understanding what content moderation is: the severity
of the effects of the job on moderators’ mental health. There is
more to the job of content moderation than just removing harmful
content.
According to the ex-content moderators (CMs), content
moderation is the arduous task of evaluating graphic materials,
navigating through very disturbing themes, and systematically
applying a set of ever-changing guidelines. This includes but is
not limited to extremely violent scenes, explicit adult content,
and profoundly distressing subjects such as child abuse, sexual
exploitation, self-harm, and more. The CM’s responsibilities extend
to the assessments of social media posts depicting harrowing
scenarios like violent death, suicide, murder, assault, massacre,
harm against animals, as well as instances of hate speech and
sexualized violence.

WHAT IS SAMA?
Samasource, which later changed its name to Sama and very
recently to Samasource Impact Sourcing INC, is a company founded
by the late Leila Janah in 2008.
According to many sources, Leila was an American businesswoman
and tech entrepreneur who founded Sama (which means equal in
Sanskrit) in an aim to give work with dignity, rather than aid, to the
less fortunate and vulnerable African population.
However, unfortunately, Leila’s stated mission seemed to get
hijacked after her passing by Sama and tech companies such as Meta
that target cheap labor through their subcontractors. According
to many reports and research published in the last few years,
these giant tech companies hire data workers through outsourced
companies so that they can profit and exploit, as well as easily get
away from their responsibility for the many emotional, mental, and
physiological harms the job may cause data workers.

BPO (business process outsourcing) companies like Sama are
doing the sales grooming and allowing big tech companies to exploit
African workers for little pay in poor working conditions, before
disposing of them after they develop mental and psychological
health issues. This was evident in the recent case of the African
content moderators who were working under very poor conditions
and later got laid off without warning by Meta’s Sama. A lawsuit
that was filed by the moderators claims that Meta discontinued its
contract as retaliation after the moderators demanded better work
conditions and attempted to form a workers’ union.
FALSE PROMISES,
THE MISLEADING TRAINING PHASE
In February 2019, Sama announced that it would launch
content moderation jobs in Nairobi, Kenya, which would create job
opportunities for more than 200 African youths from different
countries. After that announcement, Sama recruited data workers
mainly from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria,
Burundi, Somalia, and Namibia.
Most of the content moderators at first felt like they were on top
of the world after they joined the company. The thought of working
for a big and famous platform like Facebook made them feel like
they were privileged. For a moment they considered themselves as
special or the lucky ones.
However, their exhilaration and feelings of vitality were short
lived, as after a few months, they started to feel the heat. As days
went by, the effects of the job became overwhelming and it started
to take a serious mental and emotional toll on the data workers. For
most, it started as a lack of sleep, night terrors, major panic attacks
followed by deep feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and
various psychological disorders such as sleep disorder, eating
disorder, and social anxiety, among others.
As I will explain in this report, after about one year, most of the
moderators found themselves addicted to pharmaceutical drugs
and other harmful habits in order to cope with the harrowing images
and videos they were subjected to every day for 8 hours a day,
40 hours a week. To make it worse, the company refused to help
the moderators when it came to providing proper mental health
care. The counselors provided by Sama were not experienced
psychologists, and some of the moderators claim they were
uncertified psychologists whom the company placed to spy on and
monitor workers rather than to offer to help workers through their
suffering.
Years passed by, and despite the terrible conditions, most of the
moderators couldn’t find the courage to quit the job. For most, it
was the only means of income; their lives and their families’ lives
depended on this job. For others, it was a way of securing their work
permit and working visas, as they had fled their home countries as
refugees.
Most of the moderators who gave interviews for this report said
that Sama tricked them in the initial stage, which was only three
weeks of training sessions.
“What we saw at the training was just the tip of the iceberg,
it didn’t seem scary or gore at first. Once we started working on
production was where we started seeing the actual videos, from
child porn to human slaughter, mutilated videos, to pictures and
videos of suicide and self-harm, all types of disturbing stuff started
to come without warning. There is a blur option on the tickets but,
for me, I would say it makes it worse because you don’t know what
to expect and you must unblur it in order to view and action the
content no matter what,“ said Bonolo Melokuhle 26, South Africa.
“At first, it felt awkward watching the nude and sexual content,
then I started treating it as normal to a point that it seemed it
wouldn’t affect my sexual life, but in reality, it actually did mess me
up,” she added.
Annika Bandile, 28, also from South Africa, agrees with Bonolo,
“I have been a content moderator since 2020. We were told by the
trainers and supervisors what we’d be dealing with, what to expect
slightly and in a very neglectful manner. As we started the work, we
got to see how it actually is. They actually did it in a strategic way
that, we would start by seeing less graphic violence and suicide
and more pornographic content to ease us in at first, but as they
unleashed the full batch of the graphic and suicide content, things
became too much to bear,” said Annika.
“What has really messed me up the most is seeing hundreds of
mutilated bodies from road carnage. I have seen people’s body
parts sliced into pieces, some still alive experiencing the pain, some
with parts of the brain splat on the road, some have had intestines
hanging out as they hold on to them, crying, waiting for help. I have
these pictures stuck in my mind to this date. I don’t think I would
be able to delete this from my memory. This has made me become
paranoid whenever I am on the road. These images in my head mixed
with my fear of uncertainty has always made me be in constant fear
whenever I’m on the road,” said Annika.
Sokoro Thabiti is a 32-year-old Kenyan ex-content moderator. He
heard about the job from one of his friends. “I was told I would be
working in a call center. I feel betrayed and lied to because what I
expected is far from what I would ever imagined. I found myself in
a loophole of a very toxic job with never-ending torture and trauma.
And to make it worse, our employer never offered appropriate health
care knowing what we deal with.”
Like his colleagues, Sokoro remembers every one of the goriest
content that he reviewed for three years vividly. And somehow, it
changed his personality and his psyche.
“Working as a content moderator has really changed how I view
things now. If I didn’t have enough reason to hate humanity, well,
now I do. I envy those who do not see the ugly and sadistic side
of people, they are so lucky to have their innocent minds. Through
content moderation, I got to see how evil humans can be, how sad
and tragic the world really is, and also how unfortunate some people
are. I do not believe there is anyone who would really be strong or
prepared enough to go through hundreds of pictures and videos
depicting the worst and most disturbing content and not change or
be affected in some way. We absorb this content for years.
“Of all the disturbing stuff that I consumed for years, there is this
one video that I won’t ever be able to forget. The fact that I love
animals and that I have had a pet ever since I was a child, I always
wanted to protect them. I got this video where a woman placed a
kitten in a large mortar and beat it to a pinkish pulp, to a point you
would not recognize it was a living kitten. That sickened me, and
ruined my mood for months, and up to now the image is still in
my mind. Thinking of it still makes me sick, and it will not leave my
mind no matter how hard I try. It may not affect others as much,
and they may not think of it as much, but for me, it hits home,” he
said
Sokoro is also suffering from a phobia of using road transportation
as a result of watching hundreds of videos depicting road accidents
with graphic content: “That is one of my biggest fears. This has
made me very afraid of traveling for long distances and minimize
my long-distance trips as much as I can. I have been involved in road
accidents before, two when I was a kid and the most recent when
on my way to work in February 2023. Thankfully, I was not seriously
hurt in any of those, but the fact that it has happened more than
once makes me fear the worst. It’s a thought that I cannot easily
get rid of. Loud noises such as tire bursts get me on the edge. All
the road carnage I have seen flashes in my head, and I cannot help
but feel uneasy knowing accidents happen suddenly, don’t give
anyone room to react and in an instance you can become part of
the mutilation and carnage you have been seeing.”
A GLANCE INTO THE LIVES OF THE
DATA WORKERS
The production floor at Sama in Nairobi, where the content
moderators sit to do the job looks more like a warehouse than an
office. Adjacent to it is the big storehouse of Naivas Supermarket
Headquarters, located in Sammer Industrial Park, which is a few
kilometers away from the biggest slum in Nairobi known as Pipeline.
Sama has two offices inside Sammer Industrial Park. Its main office
has an estimated 1,500 data workers who work as data labelers and
annotators for OpenAI’s Chat GPT and similar giant tech companies
and products. A second office is in the back for the above 200
content moderators for Meta’s Facebook. According to Sama, this
office is to remain secluded and secretive for safety and security
reasons.
Ava Theodore, 26, is a Kenyan CM who joined Sama in 2021. She
describes a day in Sama as follows: “During the time I worked for
Sama, I usually started my day early in the morning. I woke up at
5:00 AM. I live a bit far from the office, so I must use Matatu (public
city bus) every day to work. I remember there was a time when the
company used to provide a van. I don’t know why they took it away.
I’m not sure if it’s a retaliation but all of a sudden in 2022, they took
away the transportation service abruptly,” said Ava.
“My day in Sama would be so draining, as I usually reach the office
already tired from traveling with Matatu, I had to log in and put on
the production activity code at 7:00 AM every morning. If I fail to do
so, I must make up the minutes or hours later after work or on my
weekends, or from my break time. Production time has to be strictly
8 hours on the single review tool (SRT, which Meta uses to directly
monitor the activities of the data workers),” she added.
Sama made the shift and the production hours based on the
client’s requests and demands to keep the work going for 24 hours
without interruption. Even though the workers are understaffed,
with approximately 20 content moderators for one African language,
the shift governance conduct is constructed in a way that doesn’t
stop the moderation tasks for even a minute.
“Upon reaching the production floor every day I had to fight for
a place to sit. If I come late, then it gets awkward to go here and
there to find a place to sit in. The production floor is incredibly
loud. It’s hard to find a constant convenient place to sit or to make
friends that last because everyone moves in groups. One is not
allowed to move from their chair, you can’t interact with other co
workers during production time, you can’t talk to people, or even
browse anything on the internet to distract yourself because you
are under surveillance CCTV and supervisors would rotate creeping
on your back or patrolling you every now and then, so we are forced
to consume very harmful content back to back non-stop until break
time,” she revealed.
“We have to action every ticket within 50 seconds. If we delay,
our statistics go down which will affect our average handling time
(AHT) thus, it would have an impact on our production quality
stats.”
“The only entertainment on the production floor is the SRT group
chat, where CMs send GIFs and memes to entertain themselves,
and sometimes the SRT group chat would turn into a meme war
zone or a competition among the various African countries where
the moderators came from. The content we review is mentally and
emotionally distressing, and it’s absolutely terrifying to do this type
of job in such an environment where you feel like you don’t belong
anywhere and there is no one to share your stress with,” she said.
When quality goes down below 90% of accuracy that means
workers won’t get their incentive. The incentive is a taxable sum
of 100 USD once every three months. In order to get the incentive,
workers have to work hard for it, they cannot flinch, and they can’t
even move from their chairs to fetch water or go to the bathroom.
For that, they have to use the 1 hour break which they also use for
breakfast and lunch.
The moderators have a 20-minute wellness break twice a week. A
wellness break is a break allocated to workers’ time out. According
to the moderators they have to beg for a wellness break on the
group chat for it to be granted. “The supervisors made it look as
if the wellness break is not earned but endowed and it was later
reduced to once weekly as a retaliation after the TIME magazine
article,” said Ava.
After the TIME article, tension filled the workplace. Sama called for
a town hall meeting and warned everyone not to give any interviews
to the media. Sama also started firing and gave warning letters to
any worker who seemed to be a threat to the management. Everyone
was walking on eggshells. Moderators viewed some of the moves
as retaliation, such as delaying salaries, taking away wellness time
completely, or minimizing it to only once a week for 15 minutes.
The basic salary for the data workers was 1.50 USD per hour which
is approximately 40 thousand Kenyan shillings per month after tax.
After the article by TIME, in an attempt to de-escalate tensions and
pressures from the media, Sama made a salary increase, adding 20
thousand, making the monthly salary 60 thousand Kenyan shillings.
However, after a year, in January 2023, Sama’s management called
a town hall meeting and announced a redundancy notice to the
moderators by claiming that Meta had terminated its contract with
Sama.
Since then, the petitioners have been battling with Sama, Meta, and
Majorel (Meta’s new subcontractor) in a lawsuit filed to the Kenyan
High Court. In the lawsuit, the petitioners (ex-CMs) argue that Meta
and Sama laid them off for trying to form a workers’ union, both
as a retaliation and a way of disposing of the moderators because
they were now enlightened about the job and their rights. Thus,
they became threats to the company. The lawsuit file also includes
how the moderators were discriminated against by Majorel, the new
subcontractor for Facebook content moderation who refused to
hire anyone who had previously worked at Sama. The reason for
that is that BPOs only seek new recruits who are unenlightened
about the job. This is evident as ex-moderators claim that, after the
lawsuit, BPOs such as Majorel who signed as the new subcontractor
for Meta have now moved to Ghana from Nairobi to recruit new data
workers there.
THE TOXIC PRODUCTION FLOOR
When one enters the compound, passes security, and makes
their way to the production floor, what one can notice automatically
is the deafening loud music banging from 4 different speakers. “It
seems like the music is there to compliment our sorrow or to make
the moderators forget what they deal with. I don’t really understand
the necessity of loud music in the workplace. It’s truly ironic, a
soundtrack for your distress,” said Adebowale Chibuike, 33, from
Nigeria.

Adebowale said that he is not a big fan of the banging music
because for one, music tastes differ, and also it makes the office a
chaotic environment, creating more anxiety in the already distressed
workers.
The moderators often complain about the production floor being
incredibly hot, even when the air conditioner is on. This is because
the building has a thin roof which is made of steel that is exposed to
direct heat from the sun. Mosquito bites are also one of the issues
that made the production floor very uncomfortable for the workers
as they had to endure some serious bites on a daily basis.
Lethabo Lubanzi, 27, came to Nairobi from South Africa as a
content moderator. He also describes the production floor as a very
chaotic, dark place:
“It’s literally like a cinema for horror shows, where you go to see
explicit horror scene content every day except it’s in real life”, he
revealed.
“I worked on the night shift for three consecutive years, from
December 2020 to January 2023. There are four shifts in Sama:
early morning from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM; mid-shift from 10:00 AM
to 7:00 PM; night shift from 7:00 PM to 4:00 AM; and midnight
shift from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM. I chose to be on the night shift
permanently because I didn’t like the toxicity of the office. During
the time I was on the day shift, in some way, I felt like I was in high
school. There is always drama, competition, and bullying among the
workers. The production floor seems like a war zone where workers
would divide into their respective countries and compete against
one another. I remember at first it wasn’t like that, there was
friendship and good relationships between workers. However, after
the first time workers tried to strike and form a union secretly in
2020, Sama found out and fired some of the moderators. I believe it
was after that time that trust issues sparked and division occurred
among the moderators.
“I believe Sama used our differences and diversity as a weapon
to divide us more so that we don’t plan to unionize ever again. They
don’t want us to have power in any way so they kept the production
floor as toxic as possible,” he revealed.
This 2020 strike was instigated by Daniel Moutang, also a former
CM who flew from South Africa to do the job and later found out how
the job was hazardous. He raised demands about salary increases
and improved working conditions to the company, but when they
refused to answer his emails he made an attempt to organize a
strike in the office. Some colleagues supported his ideas, while
others refused to collaborate with him out of fear of being fired from
the company. Thus, the workers were divided into two, those who
wanted to strike and those who feared to strike. Sama was warned
by the workers against the strike before the strike happened and
the management fired Daniel without any warnings. That created
fear and trust issues among the workers.
Lethabo further noted that the night shift seemed quiet and
peaceful, but it took so many things from him. “It made me not have
a social life. I still find it hard to socialize with people. Dealing with
what’s in my head in isolation made me adopt harmful habits such
as heavy alcohol drinking and some drugs that I wouldn’t mention
here. It’s hard to sleep after watching horrific content for 8 hours,
and you know you have to do it again tomorrow. My life was basically
on auto-pilot for all of the years I was in Sama. I was totally spaced
out and the thought of going to that toxic place to consume horrific
content every night became so torturous to my mind..
So, after work I sought refuge in a bottle of heavy alcohol, it
seemed easier to ease the pain of being in that situation even for
a moment. It was when I stopped going to work I realized that this
job had left me with so many addictions.
I suffer from major panic attacks because I was sleep-deprived for
years. I’m unable to afford any of the things I use to cope with work.
Currently, I’m suffering from sleeplessness, stress, and depression
with untreated PTSD,” he added.

HARDWORKING BUT
OVERSTRETCHED AND
EXPLOITED MODERATORS
Chukwu Akinyemi, 29, is from Nigeria. He was recruited by Sama in
2019 to work on Hawssa and Igbo languages. He is one of the CMs
who developed harmful habits such as masturbation addiction and
drug addiction as a result of this job.
“At first, I had some friends telling me how seeing their partners
naked and all that doesn’t get them aroused sometimes, because of
all that they are used to seeing. They feel like their mind is not there
at the moment, or sometimes they suddenly remember a disgusting
fetish that they watched from their jobs. As for me, the sexual
content has made real, practical sex not as exciting anymore. To a
certain extent, it even made porn something habitual and addictive.
Seeing it regularly felt normal, not seeing it felt like something was
amiss. That’s how it started and gradually became my addiction,”
said Chukwu.
He further talked about how he became addicted to porn and
masturbation rather than dating or having a partner. “Working as a
moderator, I have watched content of so much nudity and explicit
sexual activity as much as mutilated and dead bodies. I have
unprocessed mixed trauma that got me impulsive and having intrusive
thoughts of doing some things I’m ashamed of, like masturbation.
I’m now addicted to masturbation and non-prescribed anti-stress
drugs due to the content I was exposed to every day. Some of the
videos and images have occupied my mind and are living rent-free
in my head until now. Whenever I date a girl, my intrusive thoughts
would get in the way, and I act very awkward and nervous. The poor
girl wouldn’t know or understand what’s happening in my head and
she would think I’m weird and eventually leave me. So, I would indulge
myself in things I would regret later.”
“You see, I’m a good Christian and I grew up in church. I might have
watched some porn videos as a teen, but I’ve never watched very
explicit pornography materials in my life as I did during my content
moderation job. My personality and how I see girls have changed
completely. Watching these types of content everyday for over
three years has unleashed the wild side in me; anywhere I go,
whenever I sit in front of a computer to browse on the internet,
my head automatically thinks about porn; everything that displays
in my head is these things I can’t speak to anyone about it. I now
see myself as a wicked man addicted to masturbation, alcohol, and
drugs because of it. Sama and Meta have to bring back my innocent
brain because this is a crime. I want to change my whole brain,”
added Chukwu.
Ajab Gatoni, 29, is a Kenyan mother of one child. Her experience is
not different from most of her colleagues, except she is a mom, and
some very sensitive content, such as child abuse and rape, would
disturb her to the core.
“I tried my best I could to cope with what I consume daily for years.
I always try to leave all that I’ve seen at work and make my home
a peaceful haven where I try my best not to think about how work
was. However, It doesn’t really help much. If anything, it was just
ignorance, and I was lying to myself.
My initial reaction to watching a child being molested by an
adult… I felt like my blood ran cold and I thought I was going to
vomit or pass out. To be a mother and watching child porn and
children being raped would change your mood forever. It made
me think about the worst things. I imagined my own child and got
anxious,” said Ajab.
“I always wonder how and why some people would do something
like that, and even record it? How sick can humans be? This would
make you sullen for a while. Seeing a year-old child cry as a man
tries to rape her left me enraged and speechless. Something you
can never get used to seeing and they would leave you broken and
speechless. The worst thing is that I can’t do anything about it but
just watch, action the ticket, and continue doing my job, because I
must provide for my family. To make it even worse, the same tickets
would recur, some would be the same, and some you would see
different children in different parts of the world. It’s very sad, to
say the least, once you realize this keeps happening out there in
many parts of the world”.
Akello Kaikara, 28, got recruited to do Luganda language tickets
in 2021. Just like his colleagues, he has reviewed similar dark
content for many years. “I have seen people being tortured, being
electrocuted to death, having their throats slit slowly, being hacked
to death while they beg for mercy, and many more. This just shows
how sadistic people could be. Some were even gorging out a child’s
eye to sell. This, in turn, makes you angry, sad, helpless, wishing you
were never exposed to such things since now it has become what
people are capable of doing to you and you can’t really do much
to protect yourself. Most of the people-killing-people pictures and
videos came from Nigeria, and it has made me afraid of visiting
unknown areas because of what I have already seen.”
He added, “sometimes, we would take wellness breaks off
our workstation, but this never really helped. It was a temporary
solution to something that may affect you for a lifetime. I don’t even
understand why the company would think a 20-minute wellness
break or putting unprofessional psychologists would help us in any
way. I honestly think it’s a joke. I mean, why did the company make
us beg for 20 minutes of wellness when we have human rights
to it? I see Sama’s management as very evil and cruel individuals
for treating us like that, as if we were robots and we don’t have
emotions, and we can take all of this for a peanut compared to what
they are making every day. We need serious mental health care, not
a wellness break. We are behind the screen, sacrificing ourselves so
that the social media user does not see such horrific stuff, but at
what cost? Some legal intervention is needed, it should be stopped,
you can’t just use and dispose of people like robots!”
CASE STUDY: MODERATING THE
ETHIOPIA’S TIGRAY WAR
In November 2020, a conflict between the Ethiopian government
and The Tigray Regional Administrators began. There is no clear
evidence of who fired the first shot or who attacked who first.
However, government officials from both sides were accusing each
other of what led the situation to a deadly war.
The vicious war was officially waged by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. According to him, the Tigray Liberation
Front had made a military attack on his troops, and that it wasn’t a
war, but a mission to be carried out by the Ethiopian Military to hunt
down and bring the leaders of the Tigray People Liberation Front
(TPLF) to the law. The TPL leaders, on the other hand, said that a
genocidal war was waged against the people of Tigray because
they firmly fought for their right to self-determination and held a
democratic election.
The war lasted over two years and remains one of the deadliest
conflicts in the 21st century, claiming the lives of over 700,000
people. The major actors in the war were Ethiopian and Eritrean
military troops together with the Amhara militia against the Tigray
regional defense force. Only after six months of the conflict did the

Prime Minister even admit the presence of Eritrean troops.
While the world was busy with COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine
war, the siege and atrocities done to civilians in Tigray were ignored.
The Tigray region stayed isolated from the rest of the world for
two years. All means of communication, including electricity and
internet, were shut down. Humanitarian aid was also disrupted.
Hundreds of thousands died while millions have been displaced
from their hometowns.
The Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Amhara forces have committed
atrocious crimes against the Tigrayan people, who are only 6%
percent of the Ethiopian population. Various inhumane acts of
violence, atrocious killings, looting, rapes, bombardment, and
unspeakable crimes were committed against the people of Tigray.
The Tigrian civil society and diaspora, various international media
outlets, and many public figures claim this event constitutes
genocide and gave warnings and called for investigations about the
ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed.
The war eventually stopped in November 2022 following a peace
agreement signed in Pretoria, South Africa.
There are ongoing investigations to determine the severity
of crimes committed and whether they constitute genocide.
Meanwhile, the innocent civilians haven’t gotten justice or answers
for the devastation and suffering they’ve endured. To make matters
worse, the Pretoria agreement hasn’t been fully implemented, as
there are still troops in western Tigray, and the people of Tigray are
dying of man-made famine.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN
HELPING PUT FUEL ON THE FIRE
During the war, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (now
X) were the main media used to instigate the war and killings of
civilians. Hate speech, violent speech, and misinformation spiked
as never before. Hundreds of thousands of posts were uploaded
in minutes, so the daily and hourly volume was huge. There was a
large amount of hate speech and incitement of violence. Meta’s
Facebook was the main platform that helped to instigate violence
and spread violent speeches against Tigrayans.
Following these violent speeches from Ethiopian Government
officials, the Ethiopian people turned to social media to spread
hate and incite killings against Tigrayans. This escalation of hate
resulted in widespread violence: Tigrayans were targeted, assaulted,
harassed, and killed in almost every corner of Ethiopia. Among these
gruesome mob justice killings, there was the burning of a person
alive, committed by civil and military groups in western Ethiopia.
These actions of violence were encouraged mainly by the
speeches of the Prime Minister and his Social Affairs Advisor Daniel
Kibret. Daniel Kibret is among the officials who have encouraged
genocide against Tigryans. Social media like Facebook were used to
amplify these genocidal messages. Many related posts echoed calls
to exterminate and annihilate every Tigrayan across the country.
Following the spread of hate, Tigryans who live outside of Tigray
have become the targeted victims of abuse, harassment, and mob
killings.
Amongst the victims of the hate speech spread on Facebook
is Professor Meareg Amare, who was fatally shot at his residence
near the Bahir Dar University, where he lectured for several years,
by extra-judicial elements in the Amhara region. His son Abraham
Meareg has sued Meta. He argues that the Facebook algorithm
helped fuel the viral spread of hate and violence, leading to the
loss of many lives of the victims of the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray war,
including the death of his beloved father.
CONTENT MODERATION DURING
TIMES OF WAR AND CONFLICT
Speaking without exaggeration, moderating social media content
during times of war feels like being on the war front.
Moderators have to watch the pain and suffering through their
screens, directly from the war, and they have to delete them before
they spread to the masses. What makes war content different from
normal-day content is that on a typical day, social media content
can go from just a post of happy pictures of a family or puppies
to child abuse, suicide, violence, or pornographic content, whereas
content from war is overwhelming non-stop extremely gruesome
images and videos. Moderators face mutilated and dismembered
bodies, people being burned alive, massacre footage, and so on
daily.
Even though there was a communication blockage in Ethiopia’s
besieged Tigray region, footage or gruesome videos from the
war never ceased to make it to social media through journalists
and activists. The moderators had to be on standby to review the
gruesome images every day, firsthand.

The fact that moderators came from both the perpetrators and
victims of the war made it unbearable and distressing for the data
workers who were watching from a neighboring country while their
own people perished in front of their eyes. Tigrayan data workers
were in tremendous emotional pain as a result of being the primary
victims of the events. For over two years, they were in deep agony
and distress, moderating the war content while not knowing the
whereabouts of their family and having no clue if they were alive or
dead.
Rahel Gebrekirkos, 28, was among the first people hired by the
subcontractor Samasource to moderate the Tigrinya content in
Nairobi, Kenya, in March 2021. Going to the office to review the
gruesome content every day was a bad dream she could never wake
up from. “It was the darkest two years of my life,” she said.
According to Rahel, the distress from not knowing the whereabouts
of her family, not to mention the mental and emotional toll from the
horrifying job, has left her sick to her stomach. However, taking
annual leave was a luxury at the time, and she couldn’t leave the
job as it was her only means of survival.
“I wouldn’t wish this kind of job to anyone, not even my enemy.
It’s the worst job in the world that takes your zest for life bit by bit.
It’s absolutely soul-crushing. I’ve watched the worst things one can
imagine. It has irreversible damage to my mental and emotional
state. I’m afraid that I will be scarred for life for doing this job,” he
said.
The years from 2017 to 2019 were when hate speech spiked
among the three ethnic groups, namely the Oromo, Amharas, and
Tigrayans. And just after the war had started in November 2020,
hundreds of thousands of pieces of hate speech and violence
inciting content, images, and videos of gruesome deeds were posted
nonstop every minute, every day. Due to the pressure it faced from
the international community, Meta’s Facebook tried to manage this
content helped by its algorithm and human content moderators.
The use of algorithms was very limited to tackle this content, as
there were too many types and categories, and the algorithm wasn’t
developed as such and it couldn’t pick the violating content on its
own without seeking help from humans..
Meta, through its subcontractor Sama, had hired only eight
people who spoke Tigrinya in March 2021, a year after the
war started. This shows a blatant misrepresentation of the
ethnicities and an enormous workload to the outnumbered
moderators. Sama only added another twelve Tigrinya
speakers and only one Eritrean in 2022. Before this, Sama
had its first recruits in 2019, which were 14 Amharic-speaking
content moderators and around 20 Oromo-speaking content
moderators, half of whom were Kenyans.
Each language “market” has one SME (Subject Matter Expert)
and one QA (Quality Analyst). The QAs primarily work as SMEs.
Supervisors for each team are mostly Kenyan. Sama treats the
Ethiopian market which is composed of around 38 moderators of
both the Amharic and Tigrinya languages (groups which were in
a war against each other) as one market, even though they were
having many confrontations and arguments due to biases on the
hate speech policies.
The moderators have to follow the Facebook standards, which were
amended by a team of an unidentified number of “experts” based
in Dublin, Ireland. All new policies and communications come from
these individuals to the SME and QAs and then to the moderators.
The market has calibration sessions once every two weeks where
the moderators sit and discuss some selected content about which
they had disagreements. These sessions were another war zone for
obvious reasons, and at some point, disagreements surfaced that
Sama’s management couldn’t resolve.
The work of moderators from the Ethiopian market was also used
to train and improve the algorithms for automatic moderation. As
the algorithm was still new and had to be refined to learn to pick
up violating content independently, it didn’t do much work. Data
annotation of hate speech can’t be done completely automatically
as the machine doesn’t have the capacity to know the complex
terms and words of each language. Facebook mainly used the
moderators to do both annotations as well as to review and delete
gruesome content.
Antenh Yegezu, 32, has worked for Sama since it started in 2019
under the Amharic market. He was recruited through an agency from
Addis Ababa. “I was told that I would work on a call service. Later,
after I found out about the job, I had mixed feelings. The job seemed
easy as there wasn’t much graphic content at the time. I was not
happy about the working conditions and the small pay they provided
for us. It is inconsiderate of what we go through while doing this job,
plus we left our countries, our future opportunities for this and risk
our lives to do the job, but I don’t think the company cared about
us,” he said.
Anteneh is an engineering graduate. He received his first degree
from Addis Ababa University in 2017. His excitement in finding
a job in tech after arriving in Nairobi was high, but later, he was
disappointed as he found the job to be far from his expectations.
“To my astonishment, the content included extremely graphic and
explicit material, especially during the war. The stark realization
differed greatly from my initial understanding of the role and the
expectations set during the recruitment process. Initially, upon
securing employment in Kenya, I was filled with excitement and hope
for a promising career. The revelation that I would be moderating
content for a huge tech company like Facebook heightened
my expectations regarding potential growth opportunities and
professional development for my future career goals. However, as I
began actively engaging with the content, where the nature of the
materials became even more gruesome, horrifying, and disturbing
to watch than what we had encountered during the training process,
I realized that the situation was not as promising” he said.
“However, I had no other choice but to take the job because I’m
expected to provide for my family and I’ve already told them that
I found a good job. But the job was devastating, especially during
the war, the graphic content got out of hand. Usually, I’m a person
who doesn’t internalize pain and suffering that I watch, but this
job has changed my psyche and personality completely. Now, I’m
sensitive and desensitized at the same time. The fact that I’ve been
consuming the ugly side of the internet for so long without a single
outlet has led me to develop many psychological issues. It is only
after I stopped the job that I realized how the job changed me. All the
things I consumed are flaring up, and I can’t afford therapy to treat
myself. Going back home is impossible, and I don’t know what my
future would be. I’m afraid nobody will hire me with the psychological
issues that I have, including untreated PTSD. I demand Meta to pay
for my therapy and bring back my sane mind,” said Anteneh.
Content moderators serving the Ethiopian market in the Amharic
and Tigrinya languages had no choice but to deal with the effects
of the job, and the company did not provide on-site help. Most of
the content moderators from the Tigrinya market were vulnerable
exiled refugees who arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, fleeing the war.
Arsema Araya was in Mekelle when the air strikes and bomb attacks
started in Tigray’s capital. She and a few other friends managed to
get out of the area through Afar (a region in Ethiopia that borders
Tigray) and escape to Addis Ababa by bus. She was separated from
her parents and family members, who were also fleeing the city out
of fear.
“Upon arriving in Nairobi, I was still suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder. I was hearing sounds of jets in my head and vivid
nightmares of the dark atmosphere in Mekelle. I was worried sick
about not knowing the whereabouts of my parents and relatives. I
wasn’t even able to tell them that I’d arrived safely,” she recalled.
Along with her other friends who were in the same stressful
situation, they consoled each other within the Tigrayan community
in Nairobi. Most of the members of the Tigrayan community in Nairobi
were grieving for their people. They were in a very distressing state
as they felt betrayed by their fellow Ethiopians.
“After about two weeks, I was told by one of my friends that there
is this company that wants to recruit Amharic and Tigrinya speakers
and that I should apply. I didn’t bat an eye. I applied immediately. I
was elated to even have the thought of finding a job opportunity
that fast. Though I wasn’t that religious, I started praying to God
to get me this job. The company then contacted me after about
a week. I went through the necessary qualification assessments
and interviews and met 16 people in Sameer Industrial Park to be
trained for the job. The group of people who were hired with me for
the first time for the Tigrinya language were eight, including me. The
others were from Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and more,”
she said.
Arsema mentioned that the content from the training was
nothing compared to the content she faced during the actual job.
“The supervisors trained us only for three weeks, and we joined the
production floor. It was at this juncture that I became fully aware
of the nature of the content I would be exposed to. Nobody told
us that it was a job that could jeopardize my long-term health and
safety on top of the personal trauma and stress I had, coming from
a war zone.”

“The enforcement of a 1 hour break period, including break-time,
lunchtime, and toilet use, presented significant challenges and
created an unreasonable and inhumane work environment. The
allotted time was insufficient to adequately fulfill basic personal
needs and essential breaks, forcing many of us to either skip meals
or restrict the frequency of our restroom visits. The demanding
workload and the mentally and emotionally draining nature of
reviewing explicit content in large volumes without adequate
intervals had a detrimental impact on my mental health. Further, the
lack of professional psychological support exacerbated the strain
caused by continuous exposure to distressing material.”
“The limited intervention offered by the organization in the form
of so-called wellness personnel proved to be derisory. These
individuals were ill-equipped, unprofessional, and underqualified
as they failed to provide the necessary support and guidance to
cope with the distressing nature of the content we encountered.
Numerous requests and complaints regarding the need for proper
psychological support and fair compensation went unanswered.
It was evident that those who dared to voice concerns or raise
questions were met with silencing tactics or faced systematic
elimination from the workforce. As a result, the work environment
grew increasingly toxic, leading to a rise in turnover rates. Working
in such a tense, distressing environment, coupled with the daily
exposure to explicit content for eight hours a day, took a significant
toll on my overall well-being,” Arsema revealed.
Continuing to work on reviewing more graphic pictures and videos
was very overwhelming and sickening for most of the Tigrinya market
content moderators, especially due to the fact the company offered
no psychological support. According to many interviewees in this
report, these content moderators received inhumane treatment
from the company, which had time caps for wellness counseling no
matter how severe the graphics content coming from the war was.

Most of them were denied annual leave or wellness time to deal
with it.

META AND SAMA’S FAILURE TO
PROTECT ITS DATA WORKERS
Jandyose Mukasa, 31, from Uganda, suffers from major panic
attacks and insomnia as a result of what she consumed for years
in her role as a CM. “I watched suicide and self-harm content for
years. The saddest one I ever saw was a woman hanging her child
and then later hanging herself. Another was a man hanging himself
in front of his child as the child kept crying for the father after he
died. There was one woman who hanged herself in the forest while
still carrying her baby on her back. Another jumped off from like
a 50-story building only to injure themselves badly, all the limbs
were severely mutilated, and you could see the bones protruding
out of their skin. Viewing all these images and videos leaves you
with some sort of tremendous sadness and grief that is difficult to
cope with. I felt all sorts of emotions, some I couldn’t pinpoint, but
mostly it was deep sadness.”
“I don’t think there is anyone who would view this type of content
and remain normal. When you see pain continuously, you feel the
pain to your core, you would feel like it’s happening to you and
the more you do it every day it takes your soul bit by bit. What’s
worse is that the counselors at Sama are unlicensed. They are not
certified psychologists or real professionals in the field. They would
tell you, you will get used to it and won’t be as sad through time.
They interrupt you from sharing what you saw and tell you to stop
internalizing the emotions and saying words like ‘horrible things
happen to people.’ How is that supposed to heal me?

I always go to the counselors and come out more triggered and
more crazy. You go to the counselors for help, but you end up being
triggered and feeling low and drained after the session. To be honest,
it is the counselors that made me feel like I was someone who was
mentally unstable more because they were unprofessional. They
won’t even give you a space to cry, they are very judgemental, and
they think you are faking it or trying to manipulate them so you
can get a leave permit when you cry,”
According to Jandyose, the counselors do not keep workers’
confidentiality, and in fact, they were put there by the company to
spy on the data workers. This, in return, has made it very difficult for
CMs to open up freely to counselors as they developed trust issues
over time. “The counselors would study our every move carefully.
When we open up, they would watch us in a very judgemental look.
I personally felt very intimidated by the counselors. Some of them
are not inviting to talk at all. They would make you feel insecure.”
“We used to also have these involuntary group wellness sessions,
and in those group sessions, the topic they chose mostly was about
sex and sexuality. There were also these counselors that encourage
us to have as much sex as possible and tell us that sex helps in
stress,” said Jandyose.
Jandyose now takes antidepressants and sleep medications to
treat the insomnia, anxiety, and depression that she developed
while doing the job. Most of the moderators from the Ethiopian
team share Jandyose’s experience. The counselors were no help
and talking to them was triggering, rubbing salt on a wound.
Lwam Kidanemariam, 29, spent her dark two years in isolation on
top of not knowing whether her family members were dead or alive
while consuming her daily dose of gruesome videos back to back
from the war in Tigray.

“The fact that I couldn’t share what I watch every day with my
family or anyone and not even talk to the counselors, knowing that
they won’t keep my confidentiality, made things worse for my mental
health. I had an unhealthy way of coping with the situation, which
was shutting down
completely and losing the ability to figure out what was going on
or how I felt at all. Most of the time, I was too scared to feel anything,
I avoid what is going on in my head and around me because I know
it will hurt me. It was my only coping mechanism, avoidance and
dissociation from reality. All I wanted to feel at the moment was
being numb. As if nothing was happening, I was in denial so that I
could protect myself from the cruelty of the world. As I relocated
from my country alone, it was hard for me to make friends as my
days off are too short, and I found it too much to process what was
happening. I couldn’t find loyal friends at the office as it grew to be
very toxic. So, I became isolated, which made my situation worse.
That’s when I started indulging in drugs, prescribed and non
prescribed. There was no one to share your thoughts with, so I
started having conversations with myself, and that made me feel
crazy, and on top of it, images of dead, mutilated, dismembered
human bodies flaring up in my head unannounced because I have
consumed them as my job daily without proper mental health
care.”
“The stress, worry, and anxiety as a result of being exposed
to such disturbing content got out of my control. I started using
antidepressants in 2022; it gave me a little relief from the suffering
that I was going through alone, in a foreign country.” She added
According to the moderators, these are some of the failures by
the company to provide some essential help to ease the suffering
of the data workers:

• Not providing professional help and professional counselors.
The counselors mock and provoke the moderators’ pain rather
than helping us, telling us not to internalize the pain when it’s
clear that it’s impossible not to internalize the pain when our
job is to watch our own family members and people perish in
front of our eyes..
• Team Leaders deny us wellness time (20-min break) claiming
the particular market has too many wellness breaks which is
inconsiderate and insensitive of the CM’s circumstances.
• Not providing enough counselors on shift when a moderator
from the market experiences a mental or emotional breakdown
on the production floor. There won’t be any help to calm the
moderator down because they have to wait in a queue to see
a counselor.
• Arranging the office in a manner that a moderator sees disturbing
content in which they have emotional and mental breakdowns
and the experience becomes contagious. It traumatizes other
moderators on-site, making the office collectively toxic.
SUMMARY
Jobs should secure people’s livelihood and personal fulfillment.
However, some jobs, like content moderation, leave workers with
collective trauma that stifles natural expression, joy, and passion
for life.
This report shows that overworked and underpaid African
content moderators were exploited and haven’t gotten dignity or
work that could benefit them in any way. What they acquired from
the job instead are severe psychological conditions such as eating
disorders, sleeping disorders, drug abuse problems, and more issues
that result from negligence and a lack of proper mental health care,
which the company failed to provide.
Most of the interviewees for this report claimed that, due to its
very hazardous nature, the job has affected their emotional and
mental well-being severely. Most of the CMs claimed that they are
currently suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder,
insomnia, psychosis, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation,
among others.
So far, there has been one reported suicide attempt and a
miscarriage on the production floor. A worker from the South African
team tried to hang himself with bed sheets and throw himself
from the balcony of his apartment. Fortunately, his co-workers
who lived next to his place saved his life. Sama immediately put
him in hospital and sent him to South Africa shortly after. Sama
announced this incident to all of us at a town hall meeting and
begged us not to say anything to the media or anyone outside of
the office.
According to a forthcoming mental health report, suicide
attempts and suicide contemplation are becoming common among
ex-moderators as their trauma resurfaces after they stop doing the
job.
This report has found that many of the content moderators face
disorders that have led to addiction, drug and alcohol use, and other
similar substance abuse. As a result of the traumatic experience
they went through, moderators reported recurring alcohol
abuse and using prescribed and non-prescribed pharmaceutical
medications such as Citalopram, Alprazolam, Fluoxetine, Codeine,
Benzodiazepine, and Buspirone, some of which are widely used to
treat anxiety and depressive disorders.

CONCLUSION
In the wake of artificial intelligence, technological, and digital
advancements in places like Africa, where more than 116 million
people are estimated to be living with mental health conditions, the
topic of mental health seems to be neglected and not given much
attention.
Studies show that mental, physical, and emotional health are
all correlated and work in synchronicity. Any trauma faced by an
individual, be it mental, physical, or emotional, may result in chronic
disease, psychological distress, and loss of life.
This report shows the correlation between the content moderation
job and workers’ emotional and mental well-being by identifying
salient issues and digging through the moderators’ experiences in
depth. It describes how this type of work led many African content
moderators to develop mental health issues and left them with
various drug dependencies to deal with their traumatic experiences
from the job. Despite the job being very harmful to the workers,
most tech companies show negligence in protecting data workers.
Consequently, this report should also serve as a call for a new policy
and a new strategy to hold these giant companies accountable for
using and disposing of human beings for profit.
Data workers are essential workers and human content
moderation won’t cease to exist. But these companies can provide
an environment for the work to be performed in a way that doesn’t
harm the workers. It is the responsibility of every tech company to
ensure every data worker’s safety and security. Improving working
conditions for workers is a crucial step in ensuring improvements
in this field. For a platform like Meta that has 2.9 billion users and
a company that makes 2.5 billion in revenue every day, improving
working conditions and hiring professional psychiatrists shouldn’t
be so difficult. This is the bare minimum for the data workers who
sacrificed their mental well-being to protect their community.

GLOSSARY
ACTION: To action a ticket is to perform the necessary measure on
a single content.
AHT: Average Handling Time.
CM: Content moderator.
QUEUE: Part of the SRT in which tickets that need reviewing are
displayed in sequence for the content moderator to “action” them.
MARKET: a classification of a team based on one’s language (eg.
Swahili market, Zulu market).
PRODUCTION: Every activity a moderator conducts during a shift
(e.g., reviewing content, reviewing policy, taking a break) must be
indicated in the system. “Production” is the activity code moderators
put in when reviewing.
QA: Quality Analyst
SME: Subject Matter Expert
SRT: The Single Review Tool is a system that Meta uses to cue
content directly to the moderators. This tool also tracks moderator
performance and productivity and keeps scores that directly affect
their payslips.
TICKET: videos, pictures, or written content received by the content
moderator to review.
UNAVAILABLE: Activity code when the worker is away

www.data-workers.org