NEW: Meta has transplanted Facebook content moderation to Ghana after sacking all its essential safety workers in Kenya. Foxglove is investigating
Two years ago, Meta laid off every Facebook content moderator in Kenya in an unlawful mass firing. We knew they’d start up the same dangerous and exploitative operation somewhere else, the only question was where. Now we know: Ghana.
Days before Ghana’s Independence Day, Foxglove travelled to Accra to speak to Facebook content moderators who had reached out, in urgent need of help. We listened to their stories to understand how we can best support their fight for safe and fair working conditions.
In March 1957, Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to declare independence from colonial rule.
Now, almost seventy years later, we are seeing the echoes of a sinister history – in the digital colonialism of Big Tech firms like Meta, owner of Facebook.
Foxglove has been supporting social media content moderators for over half a decade. Facebook’s content moderation hub, at The Octagon building in Accra, had some of the worst working conditions we’ve ever seen.
Workers are recruited on false pretences, housed in dangerously run-down quarters, suffering due to the horrors of the work and squeezed for every ounce of their productivity. Facebook content moderation may be new to Ghana, but the cruelty of Meta’s outsourced content moderation is a sad pattern we’ve seen across the world.
Most recently, in Kenya.
Brief History:
In March 2023, Meta and its then-outsourcer in Kenya, Sama, orchestrated a sham redundancy. They laid off their entire workforce of 260 Facebook content moderators in Nairobi, telling them their jobs were gone.
In fact, Meta was simply attempting to switch its operations to another outsourcer, Majorel. The sacked content moderators from Sama quickly discovered they had been blacklisted from applying for their jobs at Meta’s new outsourcing company in Kenya, Majorel.
We supported 180+ of the sacked content moderators to bring an urgent challenge to stop the redundancy, and the court ordered the Sama moderators’ contracts to remain in place. Instead of honouring this order, Meta left Kenya entirely – leaving hundreds of workers struggling to survive without work.
Since the Kenyan Facebook hub was shut down, we’ve been searching for where Meta would set up its next sweatshop.
The situation in Ghana:
As in Kenya, content moderation in Ghana is underpaid, unsafe and unfair. We spoke to many moderators to help us understand the situation there and what might be possible to support them. Here’s what we discovered:
Mental Health damage: Moderation work has poor protection from dangerous content, and workers suffer additional stress from hyper-surveillance.
- Moderators are subjected to a stream of toxic content without meaningful psychiatric care. Moderators are instead offered “wellness” that is essentially useless as many workers are already in crisis due to the harrowing work.
- Gruelling targets mean workers don’t get to take a break when they’ve watched something traumatic, like a beheading. They have to seek manager approval to step away from their screen to recover, often managers decline.
- Many workers from outside Ghana are moderating traumatic scenes from conflict zones they have personally escaped from and fear they will be forced to moderate images or videos of their friends and loved ones.
- Workers also endure threats from outsourcing company Majorel that Meta will end the contract, and everyone will lose their jobs. When workers dare to push back and exercise their rights, they’re reminded they’re replaceable.
Living/Working Conditions: Moderators are housed in run down accommodation with no access to clean water and limited electricity.
- Moderators share, two to a room – even being asked at one point to share beds.
- Workers are monitored at every moment on shift. They must always register their activity, including breaks and going to the bathroom.
- The working facilities are particularly awful: workers have reported being followed into the toilets by managers who stand close enough to them at the urinals as to be able to see their genitals.
- Meta gaslights workers about the nature of the job. Every day, moderators are greeted with a screen saying: “Thank you for helping to protect Meta’s platforms.” Yet moderators are told explicitly by managers they do not work for Meta and must only refer to Meta as ‘the client’. This is despite the fact they work every day using Meta’s systems, looking at Meta content and moderating to policies set by Meta.
Pay: Moderators are barely able to survive on their salaries.
- Meta, through Majorel Ghana, pays a poor base salary and much of their pay is in so-called ‘bonuses’.
- Getting the full pay packet requires hitting Meta’s targets to receive a “performance bonus”. These absurd targets – sometimes having to moderate a video in just 20 seconds – pile pressure workers to consume as much toxic content as possible on every shift.
- These process by which the “bonus” is applied is opaque, meaning workers must struggle to work even harder, consume more content and put even more pressure on themselves to be able to ensure they receive basic pay.
What happens next?
Foxglove is working on a legal challenge to end Meta and Majorel’s exploitation of content moderators in Ghana.
We have begun working with brilliant local partners like Ghanaian lawyer Carla Olympio, who has experience bringing justice for Big Tech workers and will be an essential part of our work in the country.
Speaking about a potential case in Ghana, Carla said:
“It is very disappointing to see that once again, a Big Tech company appears to have chosen the path of denying workers their due, not just in Ghana but in other African countries.
“They need to know that whether they employ workers directly or via an outsourcing partner, they cannot escape their obligations under the laws in our nations – and I have no doubt that our courts and regulators are ready to ensure that all employees within our jurisdictions are given fair wages, provided with working conditions that adhere to international standards and treated with the dignity they deserve.”
We are growing our network of brave workers in Accra and elsewhere who are suffering in appalling conditions. We will continue our work to fight for better and fairer from Meta.
That’s why we are aiming to raise £5,000 to support our investigations in Ghana, so we can target this harm against Facebook’s essential safety workers there.
If you can, please donate to the fundraiser, here:
You can read more about this work in the recent reporting by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian.
If you’re a content moderator in Ghana and you want to speak to us confidentially, please reach out (we recommend Signal) on +44 7895 728678.