By Ammu Kanambili
NAIROBI (Reuters) – A contractor hired by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, rebuffed threats made to content moderators by Ethiopian rebels angry about their work, according to new evidence presented in a case challenging the firing of dozens of moderators in Kenya.
Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors, saying they lost their jobs at SMA, a Kenya-based company contracted to moderate Facebook content, for trying to unionize.
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They said they were then blacklisted to prevent them from applying for the same roles at another company, Majorelle, after Facebook changed contractors.
The Ethiopia-focused moderators said they were targeted by members of the Oromo Liberation Army rebel group over the removal of their videos, but that SAMA dismissed their complaints, according to court documents filed by Foxglove, a British advocacy nonprofit, on December 4. the first. Supervisors status.
In the petition seen by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them of “creating a false account and fabricating” threatening messages before eventually agreeing to conduct an investigation and sending one of the moderators who was publicly identified by the rebels to a safe house.
Sama told Reuters that she could not comment on these allegations. Spokespeople for Meta and OLA did not respond to requests for comment.
Moderator Abdulkadir Aliyu Goyo said in his affidavit that he received a letter from OLA threatening “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their photo posts on Facebook.”
“They asked us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we will face serious consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
Another intermediary, Hamza Diba Tobi, said in his affidavit that he received a letter from OLA containing his names and addresses of his colleagues.
“Since I received this threatening letter, I have lived in great fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.
The government of Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, has accused Oromia Liberation Army rebels of killing “several civilians” in attacks that followed the failure of 2023 peace talks in Tanzania aimed at resolving the decades-long conflict.
“An endless cycle of hateful content”
Court documents also said Meta ignored the advice of experts it hired to address hate speech in Ethiopia.
Alawiyah Mohammed, who supervised dozens of moderators, said in an affidavit that she felt “stuck in an endless loop of having to review hateful content that we were not allowed to remove because it technically did not offend Meta’s policies.”
Out-of-court settlement talks between the supervisors and Meta collapsed in October last year.
This issue could have implications for how Meta works with content moderators globally. The American giant works with moderators around the world who are tasked with reviewing graphic content published on its platform.
OLA is a banned splinter group of a previously banned opposition party. Its grievances are due to the alleged marginalization of the Oromo community in Ethiopia.
In a separate case filed in Kenya in 2022, Meta was accused of allowing violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia to flourish on Facebook, fueling the civil war between the federal government and Tigray regional authorities.
(Reporting by Ammu Kanambili)
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