This blog piece is part of our ongoing “Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa” symposium. To access the introduction explaining the framework, click here (ALS / LDC), to access the overview of the symposium click here (ALS / LDC).
Introduction
Every meal tells a hidden story. Seeds are prepared and sold; a farmer cultivates and harvests; traders and companies buy and sell to clients; and finally, someone cooks. The meal may look simple, but it is the product of a chain of invisible labour processes. The same is true of the “feed” on social media platforms like Facebook. Before the user can feast on the latest trending video, the feed has been sieved and filtered for consumption[1] – most likely by a content moderator in the Global South. These content moderators are tasked with digesting graphic footage of murder, torture, and child abuse so as to keep the feed palatable for others, yet are offered little or no psychological support to mitigate the real risk of vicarious trauma. In this blog post, we consider what the ongoing litigation brought by content moderators in Kenya against Meta tells us about what human dignity means in the digital economy – and who is expected to swallow it.
Why Meta disputes in Kenya matter for Africa
As of 2025, Facebook (Meta) was the largest social media platform in Africa with over 291 million users.[2] The company prides itself on being a platform that builds and raises awareness, monetises content, increases sales, promotes advertising, connects people, and creates learning opportunities.[3] Through its outsourcing and subcontracting companies, such as Sama and Majorel, Meta tasks platform workers with ensuring that content meets its community standards. These workers are repeatedly exposed to disturbing depictions of murder, suicide, torture, sexual exploitation (including of children), and the sadistic treatment of animals.[4] Many are exposed to such graphic content with little or no psychological support, subject to low pay and contracts that forbid redress.[5] Ghanaian content moderators working for Majorel, a subcontracting company for Facebook, reported to the media that they had suffered depression, anxiety, insomnia, and substance abuse as a result of the content they are exposed to.[6] Such work not only leads to secondary trauma but – by treating content moderators as mere instruments – violates their dignity, in breach of the express right guaranteed by article 5 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (‘Banjul Charter’).[7]
In 2023, platform workers in Kenya took some of these companies to court to challenge their working conditions and hold Meta and its agents accountable for these violations of their human rights.[8] Most of this litigation is still pending, but the issues emerging – territorial jurisdiction, the parameters of human dignity, and decolonial justice in the digital age – resonate across other African states.
Jurisdictional challenges: judicial awakening
Although the merits of the content moderators’ claims are yet to be determined, recent Kenyan court decisions addressing digital labour rights illustrate a judicial awakening that challenges Meta’s apparent impunity. In Meareg & 2 others v Meta Platforms, Inc; Amnesty International & 6 others,[9] the petitioners argued that acts and omissions by content moderators led to the publication of material which was ‘inciteful, hateful and dangerous’,[10] exposure to which amounted to a violation of users’ human rights in the digital space provided by Meta. Meta countered that this was a contractual dispute and that, as such, the aggrieved parties should have filed the case in the United States, on the basis that the employing company was domiciled there.[11] The Kenyan High Court disagreed, holding that because the content moderators were based in Kenya, the case fell within the Court’s jurisdiction. In so doing, the Court signalled that digital platforms cannot use jurisdictional clauses to escape scrutiny. This aligns with Principle 11 of the UN Guiding Principles, which obligate businesses – including social media companies – to respect human rights and address any adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved.[12]
In Arendse & 182 others v Meta Platforms, Inc & 12 others, Meta similarly challenged the jurisdiction of the Kenyan courts, arguing that since the companies lacked a physical presence in Kenya, they were neither resident nor trading there.[13] The Court held that it was immaterial whether the alleged violations occurred in physical or virtual space and that, accordingly, the dispute fell within the purview of the Kenyan Employment and Labour Relations Court.[14]
The Kenyan courts’ refusal to allow social media companies to evade liability by invoking such jurisdictional challenges is to be welcomed. But jurisdiction is only the first course: with most of these cases yet to be decided on the merits, the question remains whether they will find a substantive breach of the right to dignity.
Substantive challenges: violations of the right to human dignity?
The Banjul Charter is unique among regional human rights treaties in expressly recognising dignity as a discrete right.[15] Such a right is further reflected in a number of African domestic constitutions, including that of Kenya.[16] Dignity is, however, a notoriously unstable concept. While the Universal Declaration on Human Rights’ proclamation that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ has influenced almost all subsequent international human rights instruments (including the Banjul Charter),[17] its text is conspicuously silent as to what ‘dignity’ actually encompasses. Indeed, the travaux préparatoires show that this failure to particularise dignity’s substantive content was deliberate, reflecting a pragmatic desire to secure agreement over the codification of rights at the expense of achieving thicker consensus as to their source.[18] McCrudden has accordingly characterised dignity as a ‘placeholder’ – a shorthand device that encapsulates a complex and multi-faceted set of relationships which accommodates divergent interpretations across cultural contexts.[19]
Article 5 of the Banjul Charter goes some way to remedying this lack of clarity in the African context, in that it explicitly associates dignity with the prohibition of ‘all forms of exploitation and degradation, particularly slavery, slave trade, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment and treatment’.[20] This further has to be read in light of the Charter’s preamble, which situates the instrument as a whole in the need to eliminate colonialism and references African peoples’ continuing ‘struggl[e] for their dignity’ in this context.[21] This suggests that dignity in the African human rights system is not to be understood as a culturally neutral concept imported wholesale from Western liberal frameworks: rather, it carries within it a deep consciousness of what it means to be instrumentalised and dehumanised.
Yet, neither domestic nor regional case law has grappled with what this postcolonial framing means for how the right is to be understood and operationalised in practice. The cases working their way through the Kenyan courts are therefore significant not only as examples of African courts standing up to Western tech giants, but as an important opportunity to consider the broader question of what the right to dignity itself means in the postcolonial context.
Decolonial justice in the feed
Most analyses of the harms suffered by outsourced content moderators tend to focus on labour practices and the impact of sustained exposure to graphic depictions of violence on content moderators’ mental health.[22] However, while recognising and documenting the tangible psychiatric harm suffered by those engaged in content moderation is undoubtedly a significant step forward, a narrow focus on labour rights overlooks the extent to which these dynamics are situated within longer histories of racialised exploitation.
The treatment of content moderators echoes the dehumanising assumptions which underpinned colonialism and slavery, with workers in the Global South being implicitly treated as more capable of absorbing exposure to violence without suffering the same adverse consequences as consumers in the Global North.[23] While the availability of cheap labour is certainly a factor in the global distribution of content moderators, to view the issue solely through an economic lens, without recognising its epistemic dimensions, is to miss the point. Although it might be argued that content moderators are free to choose whether or not to take up this work, the corporate language used to describe it frequently obscures the work’s reality: terms such as ‘content review’ and ‘community standards enforcement’ sanitise what, in practice, amounts to repeated exposure to the worst of humanity. This linguistic distancing not only calls into question the validity of any consent, but also mirrors colonial discourses that masked violence behind bureaucratic rhetoric. That such language continues to shape contemporary labour relations is not merely incidental; it is constitutive of the harm itself.
Findings that stop at psychiatric harm without confronting the colonial genealogy will therefore have addressed the symptoms while leaving the underlying disease untouched. What is required instead is not simply the acknowledgement of harm – important as that is – but a deeper engagement with the structures that treat some dignities as more expendable than others. How African courts decide these cases will say a great deal about whether the digital economy remedies or regurgitates the hierarchies it inherited.
[1] Tiziano Piccardi and Others, ‘Reranking Social Media Feeds: A Practical Guide for Field Experiments’ (2025) 9 ACM Tranactions on Social Computing 1, 2.
[2] ‘African Facebook Users (291.10M) Outnumber TikTok Users (189.30M) by Over 100 Million’ (Interpoint 2025) < https://intelpoint.co/insights/african-facebook-users-291-10m-outnumber-tiktok-users-189-30m-by-over-100-million/ > accessed 6 April 2026.
[3] ‘Get Started’ (Meta) < https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/facebook-creator-page > accessed 6 April 2026.
[4] Stephanie Höppner, ‘Africa’s Content Moderators Want Compensation for Job Trauma’ (Deutsche Welle, 5 May 2025) < https://www.dw.com/en/africas-content-moderators-want-compensation-for-job-trauma/a-72401025 > accessed 6 April 2026.
[5] ‘Training AI Takes Heavy Toll on Kenyans Working for $2 an Hour’ (60 Minutes)
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS50KXjAX0&t=9s > accessed 6 April 2026.
[6] Höppner (n 4).
[7] African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter) (adopted 27 June 1981; entered into force 21 October 1986) (1982) 21 ILM 58, art 5.
[8] Motaung v Samasource Kenya EPZ Ltd t/a Sama & 2 Others (Petition E071 of 2022) [2023] KEELRC 320 (KLR) (6 February 2023) (Ruling); Arendse & 182 Others v Meta Platforms, Inc & 12 Others (Constitutional Petition E052 of 2023) [2023] KEELRC 921 (KLR) (20 April 2023) (Ruling), para 1; Arendse & 42 Others v Meta Platforms, Inc & 3 Others; Kenya Human Rights Commission & 8 Others (Interested Parties) (Constitutional Petition E052 of 2023) [2023] KEELRC 1398 (KLR) (2 June 2023) (Ruling).
[9] Meareg & 2 Others v Meta Platforms, Inc; Amnesty International & 6 Others (Interested Parties) (Petition E541 of 2022) [2025] KEHC 4362 (KLR) (Constitutional and Human Rights) (3 April 2025) (Ruling), para 60.
[10] ibid, para 2.
[11] ibid,para 126.
[12] OHCHR, ‘United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights Implementing the United Nations: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework’ (2011).
[13] Arendse & 182 Others v Meta Platforms, Inc & 12 Others (Constitutional Petition E052 of 2023) [2023] KEELRC 921 (KLR) (20 April 2023) (Ruling).
[14] ibid, para 63.
[15] Banjul Charter (n 7), art 5.
[16] Constitution of Kenya 2010, art 28.
[17] Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 10 December 1948) UNGA Res 217 A(III), art 1.
[18] Oliver Sensen, ‘Human Dignity in Historical Perspective: The Contemporary and Traditional Paradigms’ (2011) 10 European Journal of Political Theory 71, 73; Thomas Finegan, ‘Conceptual Foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Human Rights, Human Dignity and Personhood’ (2012) 37 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 182, 283; Paweł Łuków, ‘A Difficult Legacy: Human Dignity as the Founding Value of Human Rights’ (2018) 19 Human Rights Review 313, 319.
[19] Christopher McCrudden, ‘Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights’ (2008) 19 European Journal of International Law 655, 675.
[20] Banjul Charter (n 7), art 5.
[21] ibid, preamble.
[22] See for example Nuredin Ali Abdelkadir and Others, ‘Beyond Content Exposure: Systemic Factors Driving Moderators’ Mental Health Crisis in Africa’ (CHI, Barcelona, 13-17 April 2026) < https://nuredinali.github.io/papers/Beyond_Content_Exposure_Systemic_Factors_Driving_Moderators_Mental_Health_Crisis_in_Africa_CHI_2026.pdf > accessed 13 April 2026.
[23] Maurilio Pirone, ‘Out of the Standard: Towards a Global Approach to Platform Labour’ in Sandro Mezzadra, Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti and Maurilio Pirone (eds), Capitalism in the Platform Age: Assemblages of Labour and Welfare in Urban Spaces (Springer 2024) 50-51.
