A Nairobi-based outsourcing firm has announced that at least 1,108 employees will lose their jobs following the termination of their contract with Meta.
According to a notice issued on Thursday, April 16, the social media giant Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has ended its partnership with the Nairobi office.
The contract concludes at the end of April, with unsuccessful attempts by the Nairobi-based company to negotiate a renewal or extension with Meta.
The company stated that a redundancy notice was issued under Section 40 of the Employment Act 2007, notifying relevant parties that 1,108 current employees will be affected, with many from the specific workstream that was terminated.
In their statement, the company expressed commitment to supporting affected employees through the transition, noting that impacted staff have access to living wages, medical coverage, wellness resources, and counseling services.
As is customary in our industry, client programs evolve, and we collaborate closely with our partners to manage these transitions responsibly. Our immediate focus is supporting our employees through this change while maintaining continuity across our broader operations.
For years, the Nairobi-based company has employed hundreds of Kenyans to review some of Facebook’s most sensitive and graphic content, including hate speech and violent extremism, primarily in local African languages.
In addition to content moderation, the Nairobi office served as a major hub for data annotation, where workers manually labeled massive datasets to train machine-learning algorithms that power Meta’s news feeds and safety filters.
The partnership was originally positioned as “impact sourcing,” with the goal of providing dignified digital employment opportunities to marginalized youth in East Africa.
Nevertheless, the partnership faced intense international scrutiny after reports revealed low wages, high-stress environments, and insufficient mental health support for moderators exposed to traumatic content.
This led to the company announcing its withdrawal from the content moderation business in early 2023, which prompted numerous lawsuits from former employees who claimed they were blacklisted and unfairly dismissed during the transition to new contractors.
The legal consequences of the company’s partnership with Meta established a global precedent for the “gig economy” and digital labor rights. Courts determined that Meta could be sued locally despite not having a registered office in the country, a decision that challenged the tech giant’s conventional legal protections.
Investigations by Swedish newspapers revealed that content was being reviewed by the company in its Nairobi office for annotation. This discovery, highlighted by CNN journalist Larry Madowo, raised privacy concerns, with some questioning if Kenya was being utilized as a testing ground for the technology.