Meta said it intends to appeal the ruling – Copyright AFP/File Lionel BONAVENTURE

A Kenyan court on Friday ordered the suspension of the mass sacking of scores of content moderators by a subcontractor for Facebook’s parent company Meta and directed the social media giant to provide counselling to the employees. 

A total of 184 moderators employed in Nairobi by Sama, an outsourcing firm for Meta, filed a lawsuit in March, claiming their dismissal was “unlawful”.

In a 142-page ruling, labour court judge Byram Ongaya said Meta and Sama were “restrained from terminating the contracts” pending the determination of the lawsuit challenging the legality of the dismissal.

“An interim order is hereby issued that any contracts that were to lapse before the determination of the petition be extended” until the case is settled, the judge added. 

Meta — which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp — was also ordered to “provide proper medical, psychiatric and psychological care for the petitioners and other Facebook content moderators”.

The company told the court of its intention to appeal the ruling. 

The California-based tech behemoth has held that it has no official presence in the East African country and that the complainants are not employed by Meta. 

It is facing two other legal cases in Kenya.

In 2022, a former South African employee of Sama, Daniel Motaung, filed a complaint in Kenya against Sama and Facebook claiming, among other things, poor working conditions and lack of mental health support.

The labour relations court in Nairobi declared in February it had the jurisdiction to try Motaung’s case. Meta has appealed the decision.

The social media giant is also facing another complaint in Kenya, where a local NGO and two Ethiopian citizens accused Meta of failing to act against online hate speech in Africa.

The complainants alleged this inaction resulted in the murder of a university professor in Ethiopia and called for the creation of a $1.6 billion fund to compensate the victims. 

AFP is involved in a partnership with Meta providing fact-checking services in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

While Elon Musk claims that “almost all advertisers have come back to Twitter,” some still don’t want anything to do with the company’s CEO.

The New York Times, citing four people familiar with Twitter’s advertising situation, reported that certain brands that have returned to advertising on the platform are using Twitter’s adjacency controls to keep their content clear of increasingly troubling content — including Musk’s own tweets.

Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, told the Times that Twitter is “unpredictable and chaotic” adding that, “Advertisers want to run in an environment where they are comfortable and can send a signal about their brand.”

Announced in December 2022, just a few months after Musk took control of the company, adjacency controls aimed to enable advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing adjacent to Tweets that use keywords they’d like to avoid.

“Empowering brands to customize their campaigns to prevent their ads from appearing adjacent to unsuitable content is an important step towards increased ad relevance on Twitter,” said an undated December blog post written by Engineering Lead Nina Chen and Head of Brand Safety AJ Brown.

Both Chen and Brown are no longer with the company. Neither immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment.

Insider previously reported that Brown attempted to counter the growing perception that Twitter wasn’t safe for brands with a later blog post about the company’s partnerships with adtech companies DoubleVerify and IAS, which were meant to help with brand safety. 

One individual at the company who seems unconcerned with brand safety is Musk himself.

He has deployed an array of bizarre tweets, from antisemitic conspiracy theories to anti-transgender content and anti-vaccine misinformation.

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2023

Citing a series of Musk tweets about financier George Soros, Ted Deutch, the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, told the Times that “the lie Jews want to destroy civilization has led to the persecution of Jewish people for centuries.”

He added, “Musk should know better.”

Twitter responded to Insider’s request for comment with a poop emoji. 

Snapchat has reported another growth milestone, with the app now reaching 15 million monthly active users in Germany.

The ephemeral messaging app, which reached 750 million total monthly actives in February, continues to steadily expand its global footprint, with EU users now making up around 25% of its total audience. The majority of Snapchatters now actually come from India, which reached 200 million monthly actives last month, while North America makes up around 190 million of its global audience.

Snapchat has been working to build its European audience, with the company also reporting 21 million monthly active users in the UK two weeks back. It’s not expanding in the region as fast as it is in India, which is rapidly rising with the rate of mobile adoption, but Snapchat is still growing, despite being a relatively smaller player in the global social media market.

At one stage, it seemed that Snap would be killed off entirely, after Instagram stole its mojo by copying Stories back in 2016. That led to a significant drop-off in Snap usage, but since then, the app has continued to double-down on its niche of being a more private connective app for friends, which has helped it maintain and maximize its growth momentum.

And now it’s firming its footing in Europe, while Snap has also shared some trend notes on German app usage.

• Although we are loved by Generation Z, almost 40% of Snapchatters in Germany are 25 years or older
• In Germany, Snapchatters open the app an average of 30 times per day – to chat with friends and family, watch highlights of their favorite shows, or share moments from their lives
• 75% use our augmented reality lenses daily to express themselves creatively, have fun, and even try on and buy clothes.

Most of these are fairly universal Snap trend notes, though it is interesting to note the aging user group, as Snap continues to investigate more ways to maintain relevance as its audience ages up.

That’s a key challenge, because while Snap is a valuable connector for teens, it hasn’t, historically, held the same appeal for older users, who end up focusing more of their time in other apps instead.

If Snap can capitalize on this element, that could be a valuable growth path, as it continues to expand its global network.