Baraka Thomas Mbalakai, 53, is the farm’s namesake––his father established this farm more than four decades ago. At present, they hire day labourers to pick ripe berries every couple of weeks during the harvest season, which runs roughly from June to October or November in East Africa.

There can be a shortage of labor at times during harvest season, he explains, since the cherries all ripen around the same time. Laizer and the other dozen or so women and an adolescent boy at Baraka Farm work from dawn to dusk––nearly 12 hours––and are paid TSh7,500 (~$3USD) a day.

Their remarkably low wages make for a heady contrast to Tanzanian peabody coffee priced at $21.99 per 12 ounce (340 gram) packet in Brooklyn, New York, or a double cappuccino containing roughly 20 grams of coffee going for at least $6 at most third-wave coffee shops in North America.

A Heavy Colonial Heritage

Ujamaa, meaning ‘fraternity’ in Kiswahili––Tanzania’s national language––was the socialist ideology that founding president Julius Nyerere adopted for his country upon independence from the British colonial administration in 1961.

Scholars have described Ujamaa as ‘the most successful [post-colonial] attempt to dismantle the structure of indirect rule; while making strides in social development such as extending life expectancy, had certain catastrophic economic consequences such as declines in food production.

While the baseline of state control of agricultural industries (which accounts for more than a quarter of Tanzania’s GDP, employing the vast majority of the population) finds its roots in colonial control, state interventions continued melding the coffee industry’s  trajectory under the Ujamaa policy’s ‘cooperative economics.’

According to Yustina Samwel Komba, a historian who completed a PhD at Stellenbosch University on the socio-economic history of coffee production in Tanzania, the 1930s  colonial administration promoted cooperative societies under the claimed objective of protecting African coffee growers from exploitation by private middleman traders.

However, Komba indicates how cooperatives were wielded more as a tool of colonial governance rather than a mechanism for producer protection: enabling the state to discipline African producers, regulating production and quality, controlling marketing channels, and securing export revenues.

Rather than dismantling exploitative relations, the colonial cooperative system reconfigured them under bureaucratic state control. In the post-colonial period, these structures inherited and intensified: under Ujamaa, cooperative societies functioned even more explicitly as instruments of state monopoly over coffee production and sales.

Brad Weiss, an associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, argues that “The black market in coffee, then, is most effective in taking advantage of the need for ready cash.”

“Those who have access to cash are able to purchase the prospective coffee harvests of their clients who cannot wait for the state’s payments. In this way, control of the annual procedures (and proceeds) of coffee cultivation is cut short in favour of the immediate requirement of money,” he writes.

Only those like Laizer and her colleagues, who effectively hold no buying power, would take on temporary yet critical roles of seasonal coffee cherry picking.

The Birthplace of Coffee

Although Mbalaki is Maasai––one of the most internationally renowned pastoral communities from the African continent–– he has shifted from livestock herding to coffee farming, growing arabica coffee across 2 acres. He has a small green bean processing and roasting facility at his home, is in the process of building a brick and mortar shop, and intends on passing his farm and shop down to his children and grandchildren.

This part of the world is the birthplace of coffee. Around 850CE, a young Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed how his flock became extra sprightly after chewing on the crop. Somali merchants transported coffee east across the Gulf of Aden, where it became a cornerstone drink in Yemeni culture, before spreading throughout West Asia and beyond.

In the east, the bustling, coastal city of Dar es Salaam––Tanzania’s financial hub and largest city in East Africa by population with nearly 9 million people––is in its nascence of coffee drinking culture. Why is it that Tanzanians—the ones who grow the beans (which are mostly exported)––drink so little coffee themselves?

33-year-old Evance Malleo is committed to changing this. The winner of the national 2024 Kahawa Festival (meaning ‘coffee’ in Kiswahili), he is also the founder of Kahawa Studio Hub, an independent coffee shop in coastal Dar es Salaam. The son of coffee farmers from the Kilimanjaro area, he has labored in coffee fields since he could walk.

Yet his parents, like most East African farmers, do not drink coffee themselves, preferring chai. “Why is this the case,” says Malleo, “When Tanzania produces some of the best coffee in the world?”

Together with his wife, Hilda, they believe that by slowly introducing locals to the art of coffee to their community, they can not only bridge the extant cultural gap between foreigners and locals, but also inject orders of magnitude more income into the Tanzanian economy––upwards of 88%, according to Utengule Roasters, which has been roasting for two decades, and growing coffee since the early 20th century.

Wishful Thinking

According to the Tanzania Coffee Board (TCB), which oversees the regulation (e.g. compliance and quality control) of the nation’s coffee production, 70,000-80,000 tons of green beans are produced annually, with local consumption averaging a mere 3% of total production.

Primus Kimaryo, the director general of TCB, is an agricultural economist and has been involved with the board since 1999. Although Tanzania contributes less than 1% of the world’s coffee, the beans are of exceptional quality, mostly exported to Japan and Europe. “We want to increase production from 1.3-1.4 million bags (60kg each) to 5 million over the next 5 years,” he says on behalf of the TCB. They have embarked on their fourth year of arabica seedlings distribution to Tanzanian coffee farmers (400,000 smallholders on plots averaging 1-2 hectares comprise 95% of Tanzanian growers) to help achieve this mission, providing 20 million seedlings.

“Consumption is directly linked to income and livelihood,” he continues. If Tanzania’s standard of living can be boosted, the culture of coffee drinking may likely also grow, Kimaryo believes.

“But besides promoting mainstream coffee consumption, we are also working to expand into niche markets such as fairtrade, organic, rainforest friendly in alignment with Voluntary Sustainability Standards”, Kimaryo explains.

Kimaryo’s optimistic beliefs that simply increasing coffee consumption may be a marker of a more equitable Tanzanian economy, hides the unavoidable colonial shadows behind coffee making that trajectory anything but straightforward.

“Colonialism was as much about making the centre as it was about making the periphery,” Weiss quotes anthropologist John Comaroff, “Just as Haya (a Bantu ethnic group in northwestern Tanzania) farming communities use coffee to negotiate their local position in a global economy in ways that have been constrained, but never simply determined, by the forces of the global market, so, too has the presence of coffee.”

Weiss writes about how colonial and neo-colonial relations in Tanzania are inextricably intertwined. “Coffee is the original therapy for the micro-management of bourgeois personality,” he argues. “Coffee further permits these attitudes, motivations, and dispositions to be objectified in the capitalist reconstruction of time, as ‘coffee breaks’ become means of temporal reckoning that are routinized in labor practices.”

“Using coffee to mark and make time in this way thereby fulfils a capitalist fantasy, providing a respite from work undertaken for the sake of work itself––and thus the direct conversation of ‘leisure’ into ‘productivity’––made possible through the medium of a highly desired, commodified stimulant,” Weiss continues.

Deforestation, Climate Crisis, and Tariffs

The messiness of US tariffs has complicated business and logistics. Coffee from Brazil, constituting 30% of the global market, was being tariffed at 50% by the United States in July 2025, which ground US purchases of Brazilian coffee to a halt.

Other coffee buyers, notably China, seized this opportunity. “This forces the bags of coffee to move via different routes,” Kimaryo explains. “We’re going to see a lot of side selling, smuggling. Brazilian coffee might be rebranded as Peruvian coffee when it’s still from Brazil, just to navigate the new constraints.”

Meanwhile, erratic rainfall patterns and temperature from rapidly accelerating climate change impacts coffee shrubs particularly hard. As the most traded commodity on earth, and a major export cash crop for Tanzania, an understanding of how to cope with drought and warming trends will be critical to sustaining production.

Climate change has also heralded an onset of higher infestation rates of snails and borer pests.

And with growing demand for coffee, both locally and globally, the need for land increases. The result is that across the continent, human activities––such as coffee cultivation––are driving the decline of forests, which in turn catalyze damages to ecosystem services and subsequent economic and social benefits from the environment, particularly for low-income communities.

The post From Tanzanian Farms to Trendy Cafés: The Unequal Cost of Coffee – A Photo Story appeared first on Untold.

There are indeed certain components aimed at enhancing worker protections, such as the abolition of “Form 6,” a pre-signed resignation form in the old law, often abused by employers, in addition to formally recognizing contemporary working arrangements like remote work, and, notably, broadening the definition of a ‘worker’ to potentially encompass segments of the vast informal economy.

However, a closer examination suggests a more complex and arguably bleaker reality for the nation’s workforce. Far from empowering workers, Law 14/2025 represents a significant regression, functioning as a facade for deepening neoliberal restructuring, a sophisticated tool for enhanced state and private capital control over the labor force, and a profound betrayal of worker rights in the guise of reformist language. 

The new law fundamentally entrenches, rather than alleviates, the already skewed balance of power between capital and labor in Egypt. Critically, as highlighted by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, its passage occurred through an abrupt and rushed deliberation process, violating accepted legislative procedures and lacking actual dialogue or worker consultation. 

This lack of dialogue contributes to what Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly had previously admitted as a growing “crisis of trust“ between citizens and the government. EIPR aptly characterizes the legislation as a “lopsided law” that compounds the flaws of previous legislation, intensifying the government’s favoritism towards employers at the expense of workers.

An Illusion of Progress

Beneath the reformist rhetoric, the new labor law systematically dismantles existing, albeit imperfect, worker protections and introduces mechanisms that deepen economic hardship and job insecurity. Two areas illustrate this regressive trend: wages and contract stability.

The assault on wages is particularly concerning. Article 34 of the previous law mandated a minimum annual raise of 7% of the basic wage. In the new law, Article 12 reduces the annual raise to 3% of the social insurance subscription wage. This change has major consequences, as the insurance wage is often significantly lower than the actual basic wage, leading to a substantially smaller raise in real terms.

Moreover, the state-controlled National Wages Council, outlined in Article 101, a body dominated by government representatives heavily outnumbering worker representation, can exempt employers from paying even this minimal raise during vaguely defined “exceptional economic conditions,” as per Article 102, without clear criteria for such exemptions.

The law also entrenches job insecurity by failing to regulate fixed-term contracts. Articles 88 and 154 leave workers in a vulnerable position, as employers can use these contracts indefinitely, even for permanent job roles. There is little to no protection against the practice of not renewing contracts, which allows employers to dismiss workers without cause under the pretense of contract expiration. Only after five years of continuous service does a worker become entitled to a meager severance payment upon non-renewal. This aligns perfectly with exploitative neoliberal demands for labor “flexibility.”

The Director of the Women’s Program at the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, Dr. Amal Abdel Hamid, warns that this permits arbitrary dismissal without fair compensation. EIPR also highlights how ambiguities and contradictions in termination articles permit such dismissals.

Additionally, Article 167 mandates that employees submit a written resignation and await administrative approval. While this may seem like a standard procedural detail, it amplifies the power imbalance during already insecure job situations, limiting a worker’s ability to leave for better opportunities.

Consequently, the system effectively traps workers from both sides; they can be easily dismissed at the employer’s discretion, yet face obstacles when trying to exit on their own terms. The new labor law in effect allows employers to treat workers as expendable resources, with their job security overshadowed by the convenience and interests of private capital.

The head of the economic and social rights unit at EIPR, Wael Gamal, points out that this structure fails to protect wages against high inflation and excludes the majority of the workforce, who are not covered by social insurance and thus receive no guaranteed raise at all. Kamal Abbas, the CTUWS general coordinator, criticized the lack of meaningful dialogue during the law’s development, stating, “dialogue around the law was very limited, and even on the rare occasion of a dialogue, it did not include any worker representation. Instead, it was mostly with the representatives of multinational corporations.”

Dr. Amal Abdelhamid echoed her colleagues’ statements, adding that many of their organizations’ suggestions were either partially addressed or completely ignored and that their repeated requests for worker representation in parliamentary hearings went unanswered.

Given the challenges of an already flawed and outdated law, the new labor law fails to address the existing issues workers face and creates opportunities for further employment abuses and exploitation while suppressing wages. EIPR called on the Egyptian president not to ratify the new law, advocating for salary increases tied to the total wage and indexed to inflation.

Mechanisms of Control

Beyond direct attacks on wages and job security, Law 14/2025 consolidates state and employer control over the workforce. It utilizes ministerial discretion and dismantles collective bargaining rights, particularly the right to strike, diminishing resistance and undermining worker autonomy.

Perhaps the most blatant power grab concerns collective action. The right to strike, a historically fundamental tool for labor, is rendered almost impotent, drawing sharp criticism from labor rights groups like the Center for Trade Union & Workers Services (CTUWS). While nominally recognized, exercising this right requires navigating numerous procedural hurdles.

Article 232 mandates that strikes must be notified to the employer and authorities at least ten days in advance, while strikes are banned entirely in vaguely defined “vital establishments.” Yet another rule-by-decree, Article 234 stipulates that it is yet to be determined by the Prime Minister what qualifies as a vital establishment.

As EIPR argues, these provisions impose further restrictions, removing workers’ “last remaining tool of leverage.” The 2024 Global Labor Rights Index currently rates Egypt poorly in terms of access to decent work, alongside a low score of 3/10 for workers’ right to strike. These new restrictions are unlikely to improve that rating.

A striking element of the law is its reliance on future ministerial decrees to define the specifics of worker rights in several pressing areas. Rather than safeguarding labor protections through legislation passed by parliament, the law shifts significant authority to the Minister of Manpower and other state bodies. Key regulations outline important aspects related to new work models, such as remote and part-time employment, as detailed in Article 100, which covers definition, contract guidelines, and implementation. Additionally, Articles 118, 119, and 123 may permit employers to implement 12-hour work shifts by providing exceptions to standard working hours and rest periods.

This “rule by decree” approach legitimizes state control over labor rights, bypasses democratic accountability, creates uncertainty for workers whose rights remain undefined, and allows the executive branch of the government to tailor regulations to suit shifting economic priorities or employer demands, far from public scrutiny or worker input.

Continuity of Oppression

While Law 14/2025 mainly impacts workers of the private sector, its harshest effects are reserved for the most vulnerable, reinforcing existing structures of inequality and ensuring the continuity of oppression for marginalized segments of the Egyptian working class. The law achieves this through both explicit exclusion and deliberately inadequate inclusion.

The most glaring example is the outright exclusion of domestic workers, like those who perform household services, from the law’s scope (Article 1, Promulgation), continuing the practice of the previous 2003 law (Article 4). This vast workforce, predominantly women, estimated by media reports and Private Sector Workers Syndicate head, Shaaban Khalifa, to be around 800,000 strong, remains entirely outside the scope of legal protection regarding wages, hours, leave, or dismissal. Decades of promises for specific legislation governing domestic work have yielded nothing, leaving these workers subject to the whims of their employers without any guarantees of their labor rights under the law. This deliberate omission, condemned again by EIPR, perpetuates the invisibility and hyper-exploitation inherent in domestic labor.

Similarly, the law’s approach to the massive informal or “unorganized” workforce, estimated by the International Labour Organization to constitute around 67% of the labor force, is deeply flawed. While Article 75 supposedly aims to organize and protect these workers, the actual mechanisms are weak and reliant on ministerial discretion. The law states its provisions apply if irregular workers are employed by an employer, but the crucial rules defining their rights, registration, and access to support are deferred to future ministerial decisions. Even seemingly positive steps, like definitions for workplace bullying or recognizing platform workers, are rendered hollow by a general lack of enforcement mechanisms, a point underscored by EIPR’s observation that the government has utterly failed to enforce its own minimum wage decisions in the private sector, making such laws effectively meaningless for workers.

Beyond these excluded groups, the law’s primary targets are the majority within the formal sector. Workers trapped in uncertain employment contracts, those reliant on the minimal annual wage increase now subject to employer exemptions, and those in sectors deemed “vital” who have lost the effective right to strike—these constitute the bulk of Egypt’s formally recognized workforce. By design, the law systematically dismantles workers’ bargaining power, leaves them more exposed to employer coercion, and diminishes their ability to organize collectively when their rights under the law are violated. 

This serves the dual purpose of ensuring a compliant, low-cost labor force attractive to private capital investment while simultaneously reinforcing the state’s political control by suppressing potential sources of organized dissent. The arrest and detention of nine striking workers from the Turkish-Egyptian Ready-Made Garments Company in Qalyubiyya—accused of inciting an unlawful strike after demanding better pay—illustrates how security forces criminalize basic forms of labor rights and resistance to employer violations, and extend repression beyond the factory floor into workers’ homes. It is merely one episode among many comparable cases in recent times.

The state’s prioritization of cheap labor as a key selling point to foreign capital was made explicit when President Sisi recently met with and brazenly told US business leaders, “We have labor whose cost is incomparable to any other place.” 

The “reform” ultimately benefits employers seeking “flexibility,” and the state seeking stability through control and neoliberal despotism, all at the expense of the working class.

Beyond the Facade

Egypt’s Labor Law No. 14 of 2025 is a constructed facade. The systematic erosion of worker rights, the consolidation of state and employer control, and the deepening entrenchment of neoliberal discipline. This law attacks wages, institutionalizes job insecurity through unregulated contracts, eviscerates the right to strike for crucial segments of the workforce, empowers unaccountable ministerial decrees over legislative rights, and deliberately excludes or marginalizes the most vulnerable workers, including domestic and informal laborers, continuing patterns seen in the previous 2003 law.

The passage of this law sheds light on the fact that legislative reforms under the current regime are designed to manage and control workers more effectively in the service of capital accumulation and “state stability.” It represents an intensification of policies that prioritize investor confidence, fueled by the promise of uniquely cheap labor, over worker dignity and security. The severity of its flaws led EIPR to publicly call for the bill’s return to parliament for complete reconsideration.

Real progress for Egyptian workers, and everywhere in the world, will not come from such top-down, state-managed “reforms.” It requires a fundamental shift in the balance of power. This necessitates the strengthening of independent, democratic trade unions capable of challenging employers when their rights are violated; the legislative guarantee of a living wage based on socioeconomic realities indexed to inflation; the inclusion of all workers, including domestic and informal workers, under protective legislation; and the right to organize and strike. Until then, laws like 14/2025 will remain what they are, instruments of repression under the thin veil of reform.

As the Egyptian state touts the new law as a landmark reform, workers across the country know all too well that rights on paper mean little without the power to claim them. In a country where the phrase “البلد دي فيها قانون” (this country has laws) is often wielded by authorities to coerce, silence, and intimidate, it has long been understood—especially by the most marginalized—that the law often serves power, not justice.

Even if Law 14 had offered stronger protections, its implementation would still depend on a system designed to deny workers the tools to demand their rights. True justice for Egypt’s working class requires more than legislative reform; it demands dismantling the structures of coercion, exclusion, and repression that define the current labor regime. Until then, “reform” will remain a hollow slogan, and the law another instrument to keep workers in check rather than set them free.

The post Law Without Justice: The Neoliberal Trap of Egypt’s Labor Reform appeared first on Untold.

allapopp (Digital Media and Performance Artist), Milagros Miceli (Sociologist and Computer Scientist, DAIR Institute, AR/DE), Marwa Fatafta (Researcher, Policy Analyst and Digital Rights Expert, PS/DE). Moderated by Walid El-Houri (Researcher and Editor, LBN/DE).

This panel brings together three different situated experiences of the development of AI technologies (including machine learning, digital surveillance, data generation and labelling), challenging the language used to describe them, their inner functioning and their application in both civilian and wartime contexts. Technologies are never neutral and reflect the biases, systemic structures and cultural paradigms of the geographical, social and political contexts in which they are developed. Furthermore, their usage is brining concrete consequences affecting the lives of marginalised communities and contributing in generating transational repression.

While engaging with recent developments in decolonial thought in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the Decolonial AI Manyfesto and embracing both personal hopes and discomfort caused by the expanding post-Soviet decolonial dialogue, with its new hot spot in Berlin, allapopp envisioned an ambitious experiment: to facilitate a conversation about technology in general, and the future with AI in particular, led by “us*- born on the (post)colonial margins of post-Soviet translocal experiences, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic half-bloods.” By doing so, allapopp aims for these imaginations to enter a tangible realm of technological envisioning – envisioning futurities as a means of political participation and self-determination. And while doing so, allapopp continuously wonders: who is us*?

Through a specific investigation of data work, the often overlooked labour essential to creating datasets, Milagros Miceli discusses how it plays a critical role in shaping AI technologies. In this talk, she will present findings from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project conducted with 15 data workers. She will describe how issues of migration, exploration, and power shape data work, significantly impacting datasets and AI systems, and argue for the importance of addressing historical inequities, labour conditions, and epistemological standpoints when discussing AI Ethics. This talk will also highlight the need for new research questions and methodologies to better understand the complexities of AI data work.

Looking beyond the harms or ‘side effects’ of AI and its dangerous impact on marginalised and racialised communities, Marwa Fatafta‘s presentation draws on the current reality of occupied Palestine, where these technologies have been designed to automate systematic discrimination, human rights abuses, and large-scale killing. She will discuss Israel’s recent use of AI systems in warfare to surveil, target, and bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure on an industrial scale in Gaza and its implication on a global scale. Far from being an isolated issue in a faraway land, she will showcase how these battle-tested technologies and systems – and the industries behind them – are often repurposed to fuel the oppression and crackdown on migrants and minorities here in Europe. Finally, she’ll delve into the complicity of big tech in providing the technologies or services underpinning these abusive systems without transparency and how we can hold them accountable.

The post Video: Decolonising AI appeared first on Untold.

From Tuesday onwards, he prepares, sets up equipment, records videos, edits and distributes them, monitors their reception, and responds to interactions. In between, he keeps up with global trends to innovate constantly and meet platform demands.

“I call myself a multi-artist to encompass more possibilities, but for 4 years, I’ve worked online as a digital influencer,” he says. Known in Belo Horizonte, capital of the country’s southeastern Minas Gerais state, as @alomarilu, Luan gives travel, beauty and fashion tips, as well as reflections on life, recipes, and the daily routines of his pets. In practice, he works on and for digital platforms, mainly Instagram, which he calls “my mini reality show”. 

Digital influencers like him are part of a broader context that researchers call the platformization of work. This global phenomenon impacts various sectors of the digital economy, introducing information and communication technologies into work relationships, thereby controlling and generating service delivery.

“This dynamic is observed in various sectors, such as delivery and ride-sharing services,” explains Nina Desgranges, a Brazilian social scientist and researcher at the Institute of Technology and Society (ITS). “Content creators who bring forth or hope to bring forth income through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch can be classified as platform workers and, more specifically, as cultural workers in the platform economy,” she adds.

All digital platform work has a similar contradictory nature, including influencers: on one hand, the promise of flexibility and autonomy; on the other, working conditions that deviate from formal employment relationships, transferring any risks to the workers. This nature raises important issues related to labor rights and the regulation of these platforms and the work they facilitate.

Despite the common perception that influencers are paid to do something easy, lucrative, and enjoyable, their work routine is often marked by uncertainty, irregular pay, fluctuating follower counts, and compromised mental health.

Flávia Pinho, another influencer based in Belo Horizonte explains that digital content creation “is a very complete and complex work.” 

Flávia got into the digital content creation business in 2015 to promote her makeup work: “I started with photos of clients, but as there was no demand I ended up putting on a lot of makeup. I realized that this type of content brought me more engagement and I started to explore this side.”  

For her, “the big challenge is to create a connection with the public in order to reach a place of influence and achieve tangible financial returns. This takes time and dedication.”

“It seems simple, but it involves many steps and, for the most part, we need to master many areas, photography, editing, script development, client prospecting, in addition to the charisma that has to appear without a shadow of a doubt,” she adds. 

Her success on digital platforms – with over 160,000 followers on her Instagram account @__flaviapinho –  allowed her to open her own beauty salon called Glow in 2020. “I am currently dedicating much more of my time and energy to Glow considering the challenges of a new company on the market, but my goal is to return with my content in a more professional way,” she says.

Brazil tops the list of countries with Instagram influencers, with over 10.5 million users, according to annual studies by Nielsen. On TikTok and YouTube, Brazil ranks second, behind only the United States.

Given the large number of influencers, working conditions need careful consideration: over 68% of digital influencers in Brazil work alone, without a team; 53% accept creating content in exchange for gifts or products; 52% worked one to twelve jobs without a contract in the past year; 71% secure one to two jobs per month; 70% have accepted a job for much less than they asked for. These figures come from the Creators & Business survey, a partnership between Brunch and YOUPIX companies.

“It’s work without pay, done in the expectation of making it. In this case, you work imagining that one day you will be an influencer who lives entirely from the income of influence. Until that moment arrives, you work for free for the platforms,” explains Issaaf Karhawi, professor at Universidade Paulista with a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo.

Given these dynamics, platformized work is created without ethical and regulatory precedents in one of the most content-producing and audience-influencing countries in the world. While some countries have initial experiences of regulation, Brazil is beginning to discuss its solutions.

The debate about solutions and platform work regulation often focuses on delivery drivers and app-based drivers, but according to experts influencers should also be included in this long conversation.

Luan sees positive impacts in regulation and the debate it foments. “We are discussing what the work is and what it will become, given AI, for example… I think it’s important to regulate because of market saturation and the need for future security, even considering retirement,” he says.

For Flavia, the debate about regulating platforms is very important but there needs to be a balance: “I imagine that regulation can help guarantee some benefits, bring a little more transparency, financial protection, but it is important that these rules do not stifle creative freedom or make things too bureaucratic. It would make life very difficult, especially for small creators.”

Recognizing content creation as a profession and regulating it can not only legitimize the work but also open doors to essential protections and rights, leading to the development of ethical codes applied to the category, all to prevent the silent precarization of influencers’ work.

For Issaaf Karhawi, demands should start with transparency. “There are many discussions about monetization, of course, but… the essential thing is transparency in the relationship with platforms because influencers report not fully understanding how they work,” she explains.

Platforms often do not disclose how algorithms work, affecting the visibility of influencers’ content without their knowledge. Moreover, they collect vast amounts of data on influencers and their followers but do not always clarify how this data is used or shared.

Nina Desgranges, a researcher at the Institute of Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro, highlights another item on the content creators’ list of demands for regulation: “policies that protect influencers’ intellectual property and provide mechanisms to resolve contractual disputes.”

In Brazil, where union culture has deep roots, association should also be considered an important topic in strengthening the Creator Economy. “Collaboration between influencers, unions, civil society organizations, and legislators can be crucial for developing effective policies that protect digital workers’ rights and interests,” Desgranges emphasizes.

Brazilian laws need to evolve alongside digital transformation. The process of the Bill 2630/2020 started in 2020, when it was presented and debated by the Brazilian Congress.

The bill creates the Brazilian Internet Freedom, Responsibility, and Transparency Law and proposes regulating digital platforms like Google, Meta (Instagram and Facebook), X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, in addition to instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. The proposal has caused significant political instability and public lobbying movements among big tech.

The bill does not solely concern creators; it is broader and focuses mainly on controlling the spread of false information and hate speech online. The idea is to hold platforms accountable so that accounts or posts with criminal content can be more easily identified, removed, or flagged.

One key proposal is holding companies responsible for content published by third parties. Currently, there is no Brazilian law allowing their punishment in case of offensive or criminal content on their platforms.

Although not focused on creators, the bill promotes public debate and an environment filled with new ideas. Despite being processed under urgency, the bill has been stalled in the Brazilian Congress for a year.

For public debate to advance, legislators and society can use public consultation as a vital tool to understand the needs of content production professionals for and on platforms.

Collaboration between legislators and the creator community is key to effective and adaptable regulation, which, when done collectively and with concern, can promote a creative, healthy, and prosperous ecosystem.

“I believe it is possible for our lives to be transformed by this profession. But beyond the specialists, we, and especially Gen Z, need to be heard as well and commit to this debate”, opines Luan, while producing his “mini reality show” on Instagram.

The post Brazilian influencers: We are precarious workers too! appeared first on Untold.