Tech Empire #19: Facebook’s African Sweatshop with Billy Perrigo

Today we welcome Billy Perrigo to discuss the exploitation of African workers performing content moderation for Facebook. Billy is a staff writer at TIME covering social media companies, with a focus on content moderation and responsible AI.

In this episode, we cover Billy’s article at TIME, “Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop”, which exposes how Facebook outsources content moderation on the cheap to a company called Sama in Kenya. Billy explains how he discovered the story, Facebook’s relationship to Sama, the low pay and exploitative working conditions faced by content moderators at Sama, how the company is alleged to repress worker resistance, and more.