Talks aimed at reaching a settlement in a long-running case brought by 184 Nairobi-based Facebook moderators against the platform’s owner, Meta, have broken down.
The moderators, who filtered out violent and graphic content, allege they were laid off for organising a union.
They were made redundant from Sama, a local subcontractor.
Sama has previously told the BBC it has no opposition to unionisation.
The moderators are suing Meta, Sama and another outsourcing firm, Majorel.
Meta uses artificial intelligence to help spot and remove graphic Facebook content, but it also still relies on thousands of human workers to spot problematic posts.
Several moderators have spoken out about the traumatising nature of the content they worked to filter out of people’s feeds, for which they were paid about $630 (£515) per month, according to Sama.
One moderator involved in the legal action told the BBC of his distress at seeing a video in which a man took his own life in the presence of a child.
Sama has always maintained it provided good salaries in local terms, as well as mental health support. —BBC
