A Kenyan content moderator who once worked for Facebook owner, Meta Platforms Inc, on Tuesday, filed a lawsuit over the alleged poor working conditions for contracted content moderators which violates the Kenyan constitution.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Daniel Motaung who was recruited in 2019 from South Africa to work for Sama in Nairobi. Motaung said he was not given details about the nature of the work reviewing Facebook posts before his arrival and the first video he remembers moderating was a beheading.

As the disturbing content piled up causing him mental health issues. Motaung says his pay and mental health support were inadequate.

“I have been diagnosed with severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder),” Motaung said. “I am living …a horror movie.”

The petition which was also filed against Meta’s local outsourcing company in the country, Sama, alleges that workers moderating Facebook posts in Kenya have been subjected to unreasonable working conditions including irregular pay, inadequate mental health support, union-busting, and violations of their privacy and dignity.

The lawsuit, among other things, is seeking financial compensation, an order that outsourced moderators have the same health care and pay scale as Meta employees, order to protect unionization rights, and an independent human rights audit of the office.

Daniel Motaung

A Meta spokesperson who reacted to the lawsuit said the company takes responsibility for the people who work for it seriously contrary to the suit.

“We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support.

“We also encourage content reviewers to raise issues when they become aware of them and regularly conduct independent audits to ensure our partners are meeting the high standards we expect.”

Sama, on the other hand, said it had previously rejected claims that its employees were paid unfairly, that the recruitment process was opaque, or that its mental health benefits were inadequate.

The lawsuit’s specific requests for action are more wide-ranging than those sought in previous cases and could go beyond Kenya to other African countries, according to Odanga Madung, a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, a US-based global nonprofit dedicated to internet rights.

“This could have ripple effects. Facebook is going to have to reveal a lot about how they run their moderation operation,” Madung said.

Meta has already faced scrutiny over content moderators’ working conditions and last year, a California judge approved an $85 million settlement between Facebook and more than 10,000 content moderators who had accused the company of failing to protect them from psychological injuries resulting from their exposure to graphic and violent imagery.

Globally, thousands of Facebook moderators review social media posts that could depict violence, nudity, racism or other offensive content and many of them have reported mental torture just by going through some of the contents.