Content Moderators in Kenya Form Labour Union ⇥ nation.africa

Odanga Madung, Nation:

At a meeting held in Nairobi on Monday, 200 content moderators from Sama and Majorel — the firms that serve Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Chat GPT — took a stand against tech giants’ mistreatment of their workers by coming together to lobby for their rights.

In a first-of-its-kind event, moderators covering 14 different African languages came together on Labour Day to vote for establishing a union to address issues including mistreatment of workers.

Majorel is based in Luxemborg; Teleperformance, based in France, recently offered to buy it. Sama is based in the United States and was, last year, sued by a former moderator. The vast distance between these companies, their employees in Kenya, and their clients mostly located in Silicon Valley is not only geographic. These are some of the people who remove the worst of the web and make artificial intelligence work better.

Good for them.