Sama, Meta’s content moderation partner in Africa quits content moderation business for data labelling

By Chisom Nwatu

Sama, Meta’s content moderation partner in Africa has shut down its content moderation operations, laying off 200 employees in the process, to focus on its data labelling business.

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.

Sama ,formerly known as Samasource,disclosed this in a Financial Times report saying; “the current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations.” The company also said this would entail sacking approximately 3 per cent of its staff, mostly from Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.

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

Justifying its decision, Sama explained that it branched out into other adjacent technologies as part of its  strategic vision to be the number one provider of computer vision data annotation.

The company however,noted that the current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations, creating the need to refocus its business and concentrate solely on its 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,” Sama further noted.

The company added that all impacted employees would receive severance packages and “well-being support” for 12 months after their last day of employment.

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