• Sama has announced it will no longer be involved in natural language processing or content moderation.
• This means that three percent of staff, mostly in Nairobi, will be let go.
• The decision to abandon content moderation comes as Meta and Sama are being sued by a former content moderator.

The largest provider of content moderation for Facebook on the African continent is shuttering that aspect of its business.

Sama, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, announced on Tuesday that it was shifting the focus of its 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,” Sama director and chief executive officer, Wendy Gonzalez wrote in an announcement.

Essentially this means that Sama will no longer be working in the spheres of natural language processing or content moderation. It will shutter these parts of its business in March.

Unfortunately this also means that three percent of Sama staffers will be left jobless. Most of these staffers are located in Sama’s Nairobi office. Sama has implored staff who are affected by these cuts to apply for jobs elsewhere.

“All impacted employees will receive severance packages and employees engaged in content moderation will receive well-being support for 12 months after the last day of employment,” Gonzalez added.

As for Meta, a spokesperson told Time that the firm respected Sama’s decision.

“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,” the Meta spokesperson said.

Both Sama and Facebook (which is owned by Meta) are the subject of a lawsuit brought by former employee Daniel Motaung. The lawsuit alleges that both companies placed workers in unsafe conditions, stymied unionisation efforts and even accuses the firms of human trafficking.

As regards that lawsuit, the BBC reports that a judge is expected to rule on whether a Kenyan court has jurisdiction to hear the case.

It also remains to be seen how Meta will handle content moderation on the African content. It now has a deadline of March to find a replacement and that isn’t really a lot of time.