In 2025, the world’s largest social media company, Meta, has taken a defiant new tone on the question of whether and to what extent it accepts responsibility for the real-world harm that its platforms enable.

This has been widely understood as a gambit to curry favour with President Donald Trump’s administration, and Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg all but said so in a January 7 video announcing the end of third-party fact-checking.

“We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world, going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said, giving his product decisions a distinct geopolitical flavour.

To justify the company’s decisions to do away with fact-checking and scale back content moderation on its platforms, Zuckerberg and Meta have appealed to the United States’ constitutional protection of the right to freedom of expression. Fortunately, for those of us living in the countries Meta has vowed to “push back on”, we have constitutions, too.

In Kenya, for example, where I represent a group of former Meta content moderators in a class-action lawsuit against the company, the post-independence constitution differs from those in the US and Western Europe with its explicit prioritisation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. The constitutions of a great many nations with colonial histories share this in common, a response to how these rights were violated when their peoples were first pressed into the global economy.

We are now beginning to see how these constitutions can be brought to bear in the global technology industry. In a landmark decision last September, the Kenyan Court of Appeal ruled that content moderators could bring their........

© Al Jazeera