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According to reports from Reuters, a contractor for Meta — Facebook’s parent company — has dismissed threats against content moderators by some Ethiopian rebels displeased by their work. The issue was stirred up in new evidence filed in a suit challenging the dismissal of dozens of content moderators by a contractor in Kenya.
In 2023, about 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors with claims that they had been sacked by Sama – a Kenya-based firm contracted to moderate Facebook content, for trying to organize a union. They added that even after Facebook changed contractors, they were unable to secure the same job role with another firm, Majorel, due to being blacklisted.
According to a court suit filed on Dec. 4 by Foxglove, a British non-profit supporting the moderators’ case, the Ethiopian moderators explained that they were targeted by members of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) rebel group for removing their videos. They said that their complaints were, however, dismissed by Sama.
The moderators added that Sama had accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages. They claimed that Sama later agreed to an investigation and kept one of the moderators who was publicly identified by the OLA rebels in a safehouse.
In an affidavit, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo expressed how he had received a message from the rebels directed at “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”
He added that his supervisor dismissed their concerns upon complaint. “They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said.
Another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, explained that he also received a threatening message from OLA where his residential address and that of his colleagues were listed. “Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.
Meanwhile, out-of-court settlement talks between the moderators and Meta had collapsed in October last year.
The OLA rebel group
The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) is an outlawed splinter group of a formerly banned opposition party that returned from exile in 2018. Its grievances and concerns are rooted in the alleged marginalization and neglect of people in Oromiya – a region that surrounds the capital Addis Ababa and also the largest region in Ethiopia.
The government of Ethiopia had earlier in the year accused the OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in attacks that followed the failure of peace talks in September 2023 in Tanzania, a meeting aimed at resolving a decades-old conflict.
The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA)The negotiations in Tanzania between the government and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) followed talks in April and May that failed to produce a peace agreement deal.
The violence in Oromiya had killed hundreds of people in the past few years and been one of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s main security headaches since the end of a two-year civil war in the northern Tigray region last year.
“Due to the intransigence of the other party, the talks have come to an end without an agreement,” Redwan Hussien, Abiy’s national security adviser, said in a post on social media site X.
Meta’s negligence of hate speech
According to the court documents, Meta ignored expert advice on the need to tackle the spread of hate speech in Ethiopia.
Alewiya Mohammed, who supervised dozens of moderators, said in her affidavit that she felt “stuck in an endless loop of having to review hateful content that we were not allowed to take down because it technically did not offend Meta policies“.
The case promises to have a strong effect on how Meta works with its content moderators globally. Meta possesses moderators around the world with the task of reviewing graphic content posted on its platforms.
Also in 2022, a separate case was filed against Meta in Kenya accusing the U.S. tech giant of letting violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia flourish on Facebook. It claimed that the verbal attacks inflamed the civil war between the federal government and Tigrayan regional authorities.
Another ruling in February 2023 accused Meta of alleged poor working conditions in Kenya. However, Meta appealed the case. “The upshot of our above findings is that the appellants’ (Meta’s) appeals … are devoid of merit and both appeals are hereby dismissed with costs to the respondents,” the judges at the Court of Appeal said in their ruling.
Meta has previously responded to allegations of a poor working environment in Kenya where it emphasized that it requires partners to provide industry-leading conditions.
“Meta being sued in Kenya is a wake-up call for all Big Tech companies to pay attention to the human rights violations taking place along their value chains,” said Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer for the content moderators.
Also Read: Orange partners Open AI and Meta to incorporate African languages into large language models.
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