Auditing African Content Moderators' Working Conditions by Using the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
For content moderators in the Global South, this work provides a legally grounded method to expose exploitative working conditions and challenges tech industry exceptionalism.
The authors used the European GDPR to audit working conditions of content moderators in Kenya and Nigeria, obtaining employment contracts and NDAs that were previously withheld, revealing structural disadvantages and rights violations.
In this article, we audit the working conditions of content moderators in Kenya and Nigeria employed by business process outsourcing (BPO) companies by using the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We demonstrate its extraterritorial scope for gaining access to elements such as employment contracts and NDAs that have never been provided to the workers concerned. The results of this approach provide legally grounded evidence of the structural disadvantages faced by content moderators in the Global South, whose exploitative working conditions violate workers' rights. Our work also highlights the benefits of legislation aimed at protecting individuals' data rights as a counterweight to the tech industry's discourse of exceptionalism, which obscures its dependence on BPOs to externalise labour costs and accountability, whilst claiming that its products, business models, and methods of resource extraction are unprecedented and fall outside any existing legal framework.