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Hello and welcome to Behind the News.

My name is Doug Henrywood.

You will not be surprised to learn that today's show consists of two guests in two segments.

We'll hear from Michaela Chen on efforts to unionize people who moderate social media content,

and then from Mike Horskind on the political economy behind Atlanta's Cop City.

You may think that when Facebook or other social media entities delete a post or slap a warning on one,

maybe accompanied with a threat or a suspension, it's been done by AI bots, mostly not though.

Mostly those actions are performed by exploited content moderators operating under ludicrously strict timing standards.

They're exposed to absolutely horrific material.

There are efforts underway to unionize them assisted by a London-based NGO called FoxGlove.

At the beginning of May, 150 African content moderators met at a conference in Nairobi where they established a content moderators union.

That conference followed one in Berlin in March.

The movement started in 2019 when Daniel Montong, a Facebook content moderator, was fired from the Facebook subcontractor over his efforts to form a union.

He filed suit against both Facebook and the subcontractor, Sama, in an Nairobi court.

For more on this, here's Michaela Chen, a researcher and advocate at FoxGlove, a London-based NGO that's assisting the effort.

What is FoxGlove?

So FoxGlove is an organization that at its heart is trying to make technology fair.

We look at ways of technologies being used to exploit people, but also be on that these massive companies that are using their workers in ways that exploit but really crush them.

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