Kenyan outsourcing company for Meta sacks more than 1,000 workers

Meta terminates contract with Kenyan outsourcing firm Sama, leading to over 1,000 layoffs following reports workers viewed private footage from smart glasses. | Contesto: cronaca

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• Kenyan outsourcing company for Meta sacks more than 1,000 workers

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More than 1,000 workers in Nairobi, Kenya, were abruptly laid off on Thursday after Meta terminated its contract with their employer, the outsourcing firm Sama. The mass dismissal came in the wake of reports alleging that Sama staff, engaged in data annotation work for the social media giant, were required to view highly private and intimate scenes recorded by Meta's AI-powered smart glasses. Sama, which provided content moderation and artificial intelligence training services to Meta, confirmed the contract's termination and the subsequent job cuts. The company stated the layoffs were a direct result of Meta's decision to end the business relationship. The affected workforce, described as low-paid moderators and data labelers, were left without employment in a move labor activists have condemned as exposing the extreme vulnerability of tech workers in the Global South. The contract's collapse follows serious allegations about the nature of the work. According to reports, employees tasked with annotating data to train Meta's AI systems were exposed to videos captured by the company's smart glasses that showed wearers in private moments, including using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity. This content, intended to help AI recognize and contextualize real-world scenes, placed workers in the position of reviewing deeply personal material without, according to critics, adequate safeguards or compensation for the psychological toll. The situation highlights the often-opaque and ethically fraught supply chains of major technology corporations. Meta, like many Silicon Valley firms, relies on a global network of contractors to perform essential but distressing content review and data preparation tasks. These roles are frequently located in countries with lower labor costs, where workers may have fewer legal protections. The sudden termination of the Sama contract demonstrates how swiftly such jobs can vanish based on decisions made in distant corporate headquarters, leaving local economies and livelihoods in turmoil. Labor rights organizations have described the mass layoffs as a shocking illustration of worker precarity. They argue that the incident...

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Categoria: cronaca