Center for Media at Risk Colloquium: Toussaint Nothias, New York University

For years, digital rights activists across the Global South have complained about various harms linked to social media platforms; today, several are taking Big Tech to court. Kenya is currently host to unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc. (formerly Facebook). The first two lawsuits relate to the working conditions of content moderators and allege unreasonable work conditions, union busting, unlawful termination, and discrimination. In the third lawsuit, the plaintiffs argue that Facebook actively fueled ethnic violence in Ethiopia's civil war by amplifying and failing to moderate hateful and dangerous content. Why and how did these lawsuits come about? Why in Kenya and at this moment specifically? Most importantly, what do they mean for the future of platform accountability, not only in the region, but across the globe? This talk focuses on these three lawsuits to reflect on the broader challenges and opportunities for the future of global movements seeking accountability from Big Tech. Emerging at the complex intersection of human rights advocacy, journalism, unionizing, litigation and tech policy, I argue that these lawsuits herald a new era in platform accountability characterized by greater professionalization, confrontationality and ever-more complex strategic work across borders.

Toussaint Nothias is Clinical Associate Professor at NYU. He is a communication scholar researching journalism, digital technologies, and civil society. Broadly, he is interested in how inequalities play out in media systems, and how they can be challenged. He has written on a range of topics from stereotyping in the news to corporate projects providing free connectivity across the Global South. His work has notably appeared in the Journal of Communication; Journalism Studies; Media, Culture, and Society; Boston Review and Public Books. He is the editor of the book AI and Assembly: Coming Together and Apart in a Datafied World (forthcoming with Stanford University Press). Before NYU, he spent 8 years at Stanford University as Research Director of the Digital Civil Society Lab. There, he led various collaborative and interdisciplinary projects to explore the social impact of digital technologies.

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