Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators; The Guardian, April 27, 2025

 Rachel Hall and Claire Wilmot, The Guardian; Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators

"Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse.

Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people.

Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content.

The allegedly gruelling conditions endured by workers in Ghana are revealed in a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism."

Facebook Privacy Scandal Unleashes Nationwide ‘Litigation Swarm'; Bloomberg, April 4, 2018

Christie Smythe, Bloomberg; Facebook Privacy Scandal Unleashes Nationwide ‘Litigation Swarm'

"Litigation Swarm

"Facebook’s having to fight on multiple fronts, with potentially conflicting strategies and obligations, is what will make this ‘litigation swarm’ problematic," said Marc Melzer, a New York-based attorney. The company will likely "want to move slowly and withhold as much as they can without antagonizing regulators or the courts that are presiding over the suits."

Users and investors have filed at least 18 lawsuits since last month’s revelations about Cambridge Analytica. Beyond privacy violations, they are accusing Facebook of user agreement breaches, negligence, consumer fraud, unfair competition, securities fraud and racketeering.

Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and board members including Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel face additional claims from shareholders for allegedly failing to uphold their fiduciary duties and wasting corporate assets."

A Yahoo Employee-Ranking System Favored by Marissa Mayer Is Challenged in Court; New York Times, 2/1/16

Vindu Goel, New York Times; A Yahoo Employee-Ranking System Favored by Marissa Mayer Is Challenged in Court:

"Mr. Anderson’s suit provides a peek inside Yahoo’s controversial quarterly performance review system, which Ms. Mayer adopted on the recommendation of McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company. Similar systems were once widely used in corporate America, and companies like Amazon.com still employ analogous methods.

But others, like General Electric and Microsoft, have dropped such rankings as a tool for routine firings because of their corrosive effect on productivity and employee morale.

At Yahoo, the program, known internally as Q.P.R., has been a sore spot among managers and employees since it began. The court filing said that managers were forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team, regardless of actual performance. Ratings given by front-line managers were arbitrarily changed by higher-level executives who often had no direct knowledge of the employee’s work. And employees were never told their exact rating and had no effective avenue of appeal.

“The Q.P.R. process was opaque and the employees did not know who was making the final decisions, what numbers were being assigned by whom along the way, or why those numbers were being changed,” the lawsuit says. “This manipulation of the Q.P.R. process permitted employment decisions, including terminations, to be made on the basis of personal biases and stereotyping.”"