Resisting Meta: Content moderation, diffraction, and the constitutive power of Kenyan law in the Global South

This paper explores the role of local legal systems in the Global South, focusing on the Kenyan legal system's potential to challenge and reshape global power dynamics in the context of content moderation outsourced by multinational corporations like Meta. It critiques the prevailing structurally fatalist perspective in existing scholarship, which often represents content moderators in the Global South as passive victims of global capitalism, subject to exploitation and severe psychological trauma with little scope for resistance. While acknowledging the value of this view in highlighting injustices and the significant systemic and structural power imbalances at play, the paper argues that it overlooks potential agency. By examining the Arendse case in Kenya as a case study, the paper demonstrates how the Kenyan legal system exercised its constitutive power—drawing on Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s concepts of 'intra-action' and 'diffraction'—to actively engage with, reshape, and occasionally subvert global power dynamics.