Kauna Malgwi

If the job isn't harmful, why was therapy mandatory once a week?

So why are you providing counselors if you claim you are not aware that there's a mental health issues? If I should be in a supermarket selling groceries, would you provide a mental health counselor? Because you know it's not related.

Same job, same platform: under $2 an hour in Nairobi, over $20 in the US.

The pay is significantly nothing because we're paid less than $2 per hour. And the same kind of job our colleagues are doing in the US, Europe, and on the other side of the world are being paid over $20 per hour. So you can see the discrepancy of payment.

50 seconds per video. Even for a beheading. That was the quota.

No, you were forced to submit it in 50 seconds. So what were you asked to do? We were asked to watch the first 15 seconds, skip to the middle, watch 15 seconds, go to the end of the video, watch 15 seconds, and check the thumbnail and submit. So you can imagine if it's a beheading from an ISIS video. What does that do to you as a human? Because we are not robots.

"AI never built itself." A former Facebook moderator on who really trained it.

The whole charade around AI, AI, we built AI, AI never built itself. So, and we are never acknowledged. If we keep quiet, it means AI really built itself, which is an absolute lie. People lost their life while building AI. We have colleagues that have committed suicide.

She applied for a translation job. Her Hausa tester didn't speak Hausa.

And for the interview, I was asked to translate a Bible first from English to Hausa. And the guy who even did the interview for the Hausa language test, didn't even know Hausa language itself. He was an Igbo guy.

They signed the NDA first. The child abuse content came later.

And we signed a non-disclosure agreement barely one week into the training. So the training most was around hate speech, you know, all those written bullying, whatever. But now when it comes to suicide, graphic content, child abuse and all that, they were later in the training.

A surgeon chooses to see blood. Moderators were never given that choice.

So they took away our choice to make a decision. And that's the main thing because if I am aware that, okay, I want to be a surgeon, I'm going to expose to blood and all that, I already know I'm prepared for it.

Four years keeping Facebook clean. Now employers won't hire her because of it.

I've worked for content moderation for four years. And the moment I left, that is it. I cannot, you know, I cannot like make it a career where I can continue or I can grow in it because now no one wants to employ me. Because I was a former content moderator.

Sued in Kenya, they moved to Ghana. Then Nigeria. That's the pattern.

They feel this pressure in Kenya. They moved to Ghana. From Ghana, they feel this pressure. They moved to Nigeria. They moved to South Africa. Um, you know, they moved to all those countries. And this, what does this tell us? That these guys, um, it's not that they don't have the money.

She couldn't tell her parents about her job. Months later she testified in the European Parliament.

a few months before then, I wouldn't even tell my parents I was working as a content moderator because I was given an NDA. And here I am in the European Parliament testifying on behalf of the many, many, many voiceless content moderators all over Africa and especially the ones in Kenya. It really felt like I broke out of a prison.

An African moderator's protections were debated in Brussels, not at the African Union.

But then it made me sad at the same time that the African Union is not talking about that because I wish I was in the African Union testifying, not in the European Union, in the European Parliament.

About 140 former Facebook moderators were evaluated. Nearly all had PTSD.

All the, almost all, I would say around 140 something petitioners, which are former Facebook content moderators, were evaluated. And I would say all had PTSD.

Seeing one horrible video is bad. Imagine eight hours a day for four years.

But for this, you watch it every day. Every day. Every time you just log into your computer, the eight hours you're at work, you watch those videos. The next day, the same. So for four years, like for me, that was what I was doing.

The AI you use today will need humans to retrain it for the next decade.

So would we still be using the AI that has been built today the same way 10 years later? No. It needs to be upgraded as we humans also revolve. It needs to be. So it means that humans will still be needed to do that.