The Life and Death of TikTok Content Moderator Ladi Olubunmi: Digital Labor Exploitation

In Mart 2025, a foul odor emanating from Ladi Anzaki Olubunmi's apartment in Kenya caught the attention of neighbors. A colleague who came to the area to check on the situation saw through the window that the 41-year-old woman had passed away. Olubunmi's swollen and decomposing body was found on her bed next to two Bibles. This tragic end reveals the horrifying outcome of an African woman in her early forties' search for a hopeful new beginning. A detailed investigation conducted by openDemocracy for over a year has succeeded in bringing to light the shocking truths and systemic exploitation dynamics behind this death.

Two years ago, in 2023, Ladi Olubunmi made a major decision that would completely change her life. Closing her women's clothing business in Nijerya, Olubunmi decided to fly to Kenya, thousands of kilometers away from all her friends and family, telling her fiancé that they had to put their marriage on hold. Like thousands of Africans from all over the continent, she was drawn with high hopes to the opportunities offered by the technology boom in Nairobi, also known as 'Silicon Savana'. When she started working as a reception assistant for the French multinational company named Teleperformance, she thought the company was a subcontractor for giant tech firms like Meta, Google, and TikTok, and that she would earn a better salary than she had ever seen in her life. However, this new beginning would be only the first step into a dark labor exploitation network waiting for her and many other employees.

Interviews conducted by openDemocracy with relatives, current and former employees of Teleperformance, immigration and human rights experts, police officers, and government officials revealed striking findings. The investigation proves that the information technology boom in Kenya creates terrible physical and psychological pressures on workers, and moreover, this process is carried out with highly deceptive recruitment methods. Experts warn that bringing foreign workers to Kenya on tourist visas and employing them illegally as content moderators for TikTok not only violates the country's immigration laws but could also constitute human trafficking. These migrant workers state that they are completely abandoned by both local authorities in Kenya and their own countries' embassies, condemned to a vulnerable position.

These transnational workers explain that although they were hired as so-called front desk receptionists, they were actually forced to work as content moderators for the social media platform TikTok. Content moderation is known as a profession typically outsourced to third-party companies in the Küresel Güney, frequently causing severe psychological trauma. Workers are forced to watch deeply disturbing footage, such as murder, rape, and child abuse, during long shifts around the clock to remove harmful content from the platforms' main pages. Moreover, these people received lower wages than what they were promised, and were subjected to disciplinary penalties if they exceeded their daily half-hour breaks by even a few minutes. When they protested for better working conditions, they were strung along with false promises consistently unfulfilled by Teleperformance.

The problem is not limited solely to Teleperformance or Kenya; the company has faced exploitation and mistreatment allegations in various countries around the world on multiple occasions. In Aralık 2021, an employee at the company's Kahire office committed suicide by jumping from the third floor, citing intense work stress, which sparked a massive backlash among colleagues. An investigation by journalists in Kolombiya in 2023 revealed that TikTok moderators earned only 10 dollars a day while watching disturbing videos. In Fransa, investors filed a lawsuit alleging that the company's management misled them regarding working conditions, while in Gana, lawsuits filed against Meta on behalf of Majorel employees acquired by the company are also being examined. Human rights experts consider this atrocity inflicted by profit-driven big tech companies on workers in the Küresel Güney to be equivalent to European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.