"Mark Zuckerberg might be done with factchecking, but he cannot escape the truth. The third richest man in the world announced that Meta will replace its independent factchecking with community notes. I went to the AI Action Summit in Paris this week to tell tech execs and policymakers why this is wrong.
Instead of scaling back programmes that make social media and artificial intelligence more trustworthy, companies need to invest in and respect the people who filter social media and who label the data that AI relies on. I know because I used to be one of them.
A mum of two young children, I was recruited from my native South Africa with the promise to join the growing tech sector in Kenya for a Facebook subcontractor, Sama, as a content moderator. For two years, I spent up to 10 hours a day staring at child abuse, human mutilation, racist attacks and the darkest parts of the internet so you did not have to.
It was not just the type of content I had to watch that gave me insomnia, anxiety and migraines, it was the quantity too. In Sama we had something called AHT, or action handling time. This was the amount of time we were given to analyse and rate a piece of content. We were being timed, and the company measured our success in seconds. We were constantly under pressure to get it right.
You could not stop if you saw something traumatic. You could not stop for your mental health. You could not stop to go the bathroom. You just could not stop. We were told the client, in our case Facebook, required us to keep going."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/12/moderator-facebook-real-cost-outsourcing-digital-labour
