Death in moderation
Ladi Anzaki Olubunmi’s death has renewed focus on the human cost of technological progress – a cost that is disproportionately paid by people in the Global South.
Maureen Kasuku in Nairobi
On Tuesday evening, young people streamed into Siasa Place, a youth centre in Nairobi, for a ceremony to celebrate the life of Ladi Anzaki Olubunmi. Some brought flowers. Others carried candles. All wore black. The event, attended by a few dozen, was as personal as it was political. A pastor gave a sermon on grief, bible verses were recited and hymns sung. When the young people stood up to eulogise Olubunmi, they shared fond memories of her but also their own little sermons on the rights of data workers.
Olubunmi was a Nigerian working in Kenya, for Teleperformance – a massive French multinational outsourcing company that does work for clients including Google, Meta and TikTok.
Her job was as brutal as it was tedious: she watched out for unsavoury content posted to a social media site and removed it if it violated the platform’s standards. Former content moderators have said that the job often involves watching extremely violent posts like beheadings, rape and child pornography. Contractors have to move through such clips at speed for hours on end, getting only short breaks and minimal mental health support.
For Olubunmi, the trauma inherent in the job had been compounded by homesickness. She had moved to Nairobi for work in 2022 and had only ever visited home once since. Her employers reportedly stopped her from leaving the country because her work permit was still pending, and they feared she would not be able to return if she exited Kenya.
It’s not yet clear how Olubunmi died.
She was desperate to go home and often spoke of her exhaustion, but when she didn’t turn up for work for three days, her employer allegedly failed to check up on her. It was neighbours who found her decomposing body in her residence in the Lower Kabete area of the city.
“There are so many of us [Nigerians] working under Teleperformance and other similar companies. Most of us don’t have work permits. Speaking up can get you in so much trouble,” said a data worker who spoke to The Continent on the condition of anonymity.
Getting a work permit in Kenya has become more difficult in recent years. International workers, in and outside the technology industry, speak of waiting for months and having to bribe workers at the government’s immigration office in Nyayo House to “accelerate” theirs.
Digital sweatshops
Olubunmi’s passing has re-ignited a conversation about a Big Tech problem that is just as insidious and prevalent: the poor working conditions of workers who feed the machine through outsourcing firms like Teleperformance.
They execute tasks like data labelling for AI software and content moderation for multibillion-dollar social media platforms – under sweatshop conditions that are a far cry from the posh university-style US campuses where their colleagues further up the food chain work.
In 2023, more than 100 former Facebook moderators in Kenya sued Meta and its outsourcing partner, Sama, citing poor pay, traumatic work environments, and retaliatory firings. The case has not been resolved yet. But those workers’ grievances are clearly not isolated cases.
Civic tech organisation Pollicy says that Kenya is becoming a hub for exploitative digital work as tech giants increasingly outsource labour to Africa. “Despite growing scrutiny, companies continue to evade accountability by operating through subcontractors, shielding them from direct responsibility for workers’ welfare,” says executive director Irene Mwendwa.
In December, workers doing a different kind of tech micro-tasking formed a union in Kenya: the Data Labelers Association.
“Workers sign exploitative, vague contracts. These contracts lack clear task expectations,” Joan Kinyua, who heads the association, told The Continent. Often these annotators and moderators are also made to sign nondisclosure agreements that effectively silence them on their work, its harms and the conditions under which they do it.
“Current state protections are either weak or nonexistent,” said Kinyua. So weak that the Kenya police stopped Kinyua and others from holding a planned vigil for Olubunmi outside the Teleperformance offices.
Teleperformance said that it did attempt to contact Olubunmi when she did not turn up at work, and has promised to launch an “independent investigation into our operations in Nairobi to better understand these concerns and implement appropriate solutions”.
This is not the only controversy facing the company, which is also the largest operator of call centres on the planet, this month.
Deputy CEO Thomas Mackenbrock’s revelation that the company is using artificial intelligence software called Sanas to “neutralise” the accents of its call centre operatives in India received mixed reactions online. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard to hear, to understand,” he told Bloomberg in an interview
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