Sama, Meta’s content moderation partner in Africa shuts down its content moderation business

Sama, Meta’s content moderation partner in Africa has shut down its content moderation operations, letting go of 200 employees.

Formerly known as Samasource, it will now focus on its data labelling business. Sama said, as quoted in a Financial Times report, “the current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations.” The company also said this would entail letting go of approximately 3% of its staff, mostly from Nairobi.

According to a Sama statement made available to TIME, “We know that this will be a difficult day for everyone at Sama, and we are offering several support programs for those impacted. While we understand that this is a difficult day, we believe it is the right long-term decision for our business.”

“Our strategic vision is to be the number one provider of computer vision data annotation. In our quest to realize that vision, we branched out into other adjacent technologies. However, the current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations. Therefore, we have chosen to refocus our business and concentrate solely on our computer vision annotation technology platform and solutions. This means we will discontinue our work that isn’t closely aligned with that vision, including Natural Language Processing and our Content Moderation business, effective March 2023.”

“All impacted employees would receive severance packages and “well-being support” for 12 months after their last day of employment.”

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the end of the contract in a statement. “We respect Sama’s decision to exit the content review services it provides to social media platforms. We’ll work with our partners during this transition to ensure there’s no impact on our ability to review content.”

Meta has already contracted Majorel, a Luxembourg-based outsourcing firm, to take over Sama’s contract which is due to end in March 2023.

This action by Sama months after Sama and Meta were sued in Kenya over claims of exploitation and union busting and just weeks after another lawsuit was filed in Kenya’s High Court over its alleged role in fueling violence and hate in eastern and southern Africa. The recent lawsuit claimed that Meta has failed to employ enough safety measures on Facebook, which has in turn fueled conflict that has led to deaths, including of 500,000 Ethiopians during the recently ended Tigray War.

Sama’s contract to review harmful content for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was worth $3.9 million in 2022, according to internal Sama documents reviewed by TIME