Moderating Kiswahili Content on Social Media

Africa, a continent with over 2,000 languages and home to more than one-third of the world’s linguistic diversity, has many languages that remain beyond the reach of both automated and human content moderation. Social media platforms have a limited physical presence in Africa, operating only a few offices and employing minimal staff. Despite this, these companies have heavily invested in outsourcing content moderation labor to the continent, hiring vendors to recruit moderators to review content from both Africa and beyond. One of the few African languages benefiting from human moderation is Kiswahili, a language that is spoken by over 100 million people in East and some parts of Central Africa. In this report, we investigate how the content moderation systems of select online platforms deal with user-generated content in Kiswahili. This report is part of a series that examines content moderation within low-resource and indigenous languages in the Global South.