What The Hell America!

Firms that provide outsourced digital labor for big tech companies tend to be secretive. They are often bound by legal contracts that limit what they can say, allowing tech companies to distance themselves legally and ethically from their workers, experts told Rest of World. 

“This creates a circle of invisibility around this work,” Antonio Casilli, a sociologist at Polytechnic Institute of Paris who studies the human contributors to artificial intelligence, told Rest of World. “Sometimes, I interview people that work for a big company, [and] they sometimes don’t even know when and how many workers they have.”

A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals just how many African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs. 

One of the maps shows the flow of data and knowledge out of 39 African nations to subcontractors, mostly located in the United Arab Emirates, North America, and Europe, with  four outsourcing firms in Africa. From there, it goes on to clients such as Meta, OpenAI, and Samsung. The research was conducted by the African Content Moderators Union (ACMU) and Switzerland-based nonprofit, Personaldata.io.  

A second map shows some clients of the outsourcing firms that employ African digital workers. While there may be additional clients in other regions, including within Africa, this map highlights that the primary beneficiaries remain Western companies.

Subcontractors can profit from hiring workers in countries where rights are less strictly enforced, Jessica Pidoux, director of Personaldata.io, told Rest of World. “These companies go to African countries, like Kenya, where the government is a bit fragile, the economy, the politics, [are] complicated,” she said.

San Francisco-based Sama and its client Meta are facing a class action lawsuit in Kenya for exploitation of content moderators. Meta has previously said it requires its partners to provide “industry-leading conditions.”

To reveal some of these hidden networks, five ACMU content moderators requested access to any personal data held by their employers. Kauna Malgwi, a former Facebook content moderator for Sama based in Nigeria, made the request to her former employer and Meta. She is eligible to get this information from Sama under Europe’s data protection laws, Pidoux said.

Sama, which has an office in the Netherlands, shared incomplete data, including a portion of the nondisclosure agreement that Malgwi signed and some payslips, Malgwi told Rest of World. The company did not disclose that it had shared her data with Meta as well, Malgwi said. 

When she requested data from Facebook, she said she was surprised to get information back, indicating Sama had sent data to its client.

Richard Mathenge, co-founder of the workers’ group Techworkers Community Africa and a former customer service representative in Kenya, requested data from his previous employer, the French outsourcing firm Teleperformance. After a month, the company sent him very little information and some of it was inaccessible, he told Rest of World. 

Sama and Meta did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. A spokesperson for Teleperformance told Rest of World that the firm contacted employees who requested data within 14 days of receiving their request, and advised them about “the applicability of the Kenya Data Protection Act.”

Having workers employed through intermediaries allows tech companies to limit their responsibility, Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany, told Rest of World. 

“When poor labor practices come to light — whether it’s wage theft, unsafe working conditions, or psychological harm, the intermediaries are the ones held responsible, not the tech giants who ultimately benefit from the labor,” Dinika said.