By Mojirayo Ogunlana-Nkanga |

The digital civic space has become central to democratic participation, activism, and public debate across Africa. However, the moderation of online content is largely shaped by the Global North priorities, legal frameworks, and technical standards. For many African users, this has created gaps in language coverage, procedural justice, and cultural sensitivity. Africanisation and decolonisation are essential in content moderation to realign digital governance with African contexts, values, and human rights standards.

Africanisation refers to adapting global practices to African realities, such as local languages, plural legal traditions, and community-based approaches to justice. Decolonisation goes deeper by challenging the systemic power imbalances that underpin content moderation systems, questioning who sets the rules, who does the work, and whose interests are served. In this article, the Digital Rights Alliance Africa (DRAA) explores key developments in Africanisation and decolonisation of content moderation practices, the central issues emerging from these debates, their significance for Africa as a whole, and recommendations to strengthen inclusive and rights-respecting digital governance.

Why Decolonising Content Moderation Matters for Africa

Decolonising content moderation is urgent in Africa for several reasons. First, the continent’s extraordinary linguistic diversity demands inclusive moderation systems that respect local languages and cultural expression. Second, given Africa’s growing digital population, ensuring fair and accountable governance of online spaces is central to democratic participation and human rights. Third, African courts and regulators now possess tools, through both regional standards and national laws, to demand greater accountability from platforms. Finally, Africa bears a disproportionate share of the hidden labor of moderation, making labor justice a key part of digital decolonisation.

On content moderation and platform accountability in Africa, the most relevant normative developments include the African Commission’s Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa, especially Principle 39 on internet intermediaries, as well as ACHPR Resolutions 630 and 631 of 2025 on information integrity, independent fact-checking, and public-interest content on digital platforms. At least 44 out of 55 countries on the continent have enacted data protection laws. These laws regulate the processing of personal data and place restrictions on decisions based solely on automated processing, including profiling, particularly where such decisions produce legal or similarly significant effects. As a result, they can regulate the design and deployment of platform moderation systems where those systems rely on personal data, profiling, or automated decision-making.

In this vein, and in furtherance of labour rights litigation, courts in Kenya have allowed cases brought by African content moderators against Meta and its subcontractors to proceed. These suits, which raise issues relating to working conditions, mental health harms, dismissals, and labour rights, expose the inequities of the global outsourcing of content moderation labour and mark an important step towards holding platforms accountable within African jurisdictions.

Civil society, meanwhile, continues to bridge these gaps. African digital rights organisations, researchers, and community-driven projects such as Mozilla’s Common Voice have exposed persistent deficits in language coverage and contextual understanding in automated moderation systems. Their work shows that low-resource African languages remain under-supported online and that moderation systems often lack the linguistic and contextual depth needed to distinguish harmful content from legitimate speech, resulting in inconsistent enforcement, including the wrongful removal of benign speech and the failure to detect harmful content.

Key emerging issues include language and model bias, as many content moderation systems remain disproportionately designed for English and a limited number of well-resourced global languages. African languages are often under-represented in the datasets and linguistic resources used to train and test these systems. This can result in failures to interpret satire, idiomatic expressions, and political discourse accurately, leading both to the wrongful restriction of legitimate civic expression and to limited controls and checks over harmful content. Although Meta states that its moderation systems use language and region-based routing and reviewers covering multiple regions and languages, significant gaps in contextual representation remain. This challenge is especially evident in linguistically diverse states such as Nigeria, which has about 520 living indigenous languages.

In terms of procedural fairness, users in Africa often lack clear explanations or effective appeals when content is removed. Moreover, appeals are rarely available in African languages. This alone undermines trust in platforms and contradicts principles of necessity and proportionality established under the African continental regional standards.

Furthermore, Labour exploitation, where thousands of African content moderators work under precarious contracts, low pay, and high exposure to traumatic material continues to haunt Africa. For instance, reports from Kenya and Morocco reveal the psychological toll of reviewing graphic content without adequate support, underscoring the structural inequities of moderation outsourcing.

Power asymmetries in rule-making, where most platform content policies are drafted outside Africa, with limited consultation of local stakeholders is also a major challenge. This centralisation of authority risks importing external cultural assumptions that do not fit African contexts, particularly during elections and times of conflict.

As such, Africanization and decolonization of content moderation are not abstract ideals but practical necessities for a continent marked by linguistic plurality, rapid digital adoption, and democratic contestation. By embedding moderation practices in African values, laws, and lived realities, platforms can foster a healthier digital civic space. This requires meaningful co-governance, investment in language resources, labour justice, and greater transparency.

Ultimately, decolonised content moderation affirms Africa’s urgency in shaping its own digital future while safeguarding the rights and dignity of its people. Inter alia, the following should be undertaken to ensure and strengthen Africanization and decolonization of content Moderation.

1. Institutional co-governance where platforms undertake to establish content policy councils with African regulators, academics, and civil society representatives could help to ensure moderation frameworks reflect regional realities.
2. Language inclusion through investment in African language datasets and models should be prioritized by intermediaries. Platforms should further publish arising error rates across languages and improve coverage for low-resource languages.
3. Fair labour standards should be established to ensure that African moderators receive adequate and fair compensation for their work, psychological support is provided, and collective bargaining in rights is assured. Contractor compliance should be subject to independent audits with specific entities having oversight.
4. Procedural justice based on existing measures for redress such as that of META should be assured and upheld. Users should be notified in their own languages about takedown decisions and they should have access to transparent and fair appeals processes.
5. Regulators and accredited researchers in Africa should have privacy-respecting access to moderation data to evaluate accuracy, fairness, and bias of all research studies.
6. Regional courts, NHRIs, CSOs, and advocacy groups should continue to challenge unjustified state overreach including internet shutdowns and arbitrary takedowns as a means and strategy to re-inforce African human rights norms.