Meta employees slam decision to roll back its DEI programs
Meta employees spoke out on its internal forum against the tech giant’s decision Friday to roll back its DEI program.
Staffers criticized the move in comments on the post announcing the changes on the internal platform Workplace. More than 390 employees reacted with a teary-eyed emoji to the post, which was seen by B-17 and written by the company’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale.
Gale said Meta will “no longer have a team focused on DEI.” Over 200 workers reacted with a shocked emoji, 195 with an angry emoji, while 139 people liked the post, and 57 people used a heart emoji.
“This is unfortunate disheartening upsetting to read,” an employee wrote in the comments, which had more than 200 likes.
Another person wrote, “Wow, we really capitulated on a lot of our supposed values this week.”
A different employee wrote, “What happened to the company I joined all those years ago.”
The decision follows sweeping changes made to Meta’s content moderation policies announced by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday. The changes include eliminating third-party fact-checkers in favor of a community notes model similar to Elon Musk’s X.
As part of the changes to Meta’s policy on hateful conduct, the company said it will allow users to say people in the LGBTQ community are mentally ill for being gay or transgender.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,'”Meta said in the updated guidelines.
A separate employee wrote in response to the changes to its DEI initiatives that in addition to the updated guidelines on hate speech that, “this is another step backward for Meta.”
They added, “I am ashamed to work for a company which so readily drops its apparent morals because of the political landscape in the US.”
In the post announcing the decision to drop many of its DEI initiatives, Gale said the term DEI has “become charged” partly because it is “understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
She also said, “Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender,” adding that “While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.”
One employee told B-17 the moves “go against what we as a company have tried to do to protect people who use our platforms, and I have found all of this really hard to read.”
Meta did not respond by the time of publication.
