The layoffs were part of Meta’s plan to cut 10 percent of staff in an effort to prioritize AI initiatives.Tom Williams/Zuma
A group of 26 current and former Meta employees filed a lawsuit Monday evening accusing the tech company of using AI software to target employees with disabilities and those who took medical or family leave in its mass layoffs in May.
Those layoffs were part of Meta’s plans to cut 10 percent of its staff, or roughly 8,000 workers, and close about 6,000 open positions, in an effort to prioritize AI initiatives. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, also reassigned 7,000 employees to work on AI.
“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” the workers alleged in their lawsuit. Instead, the suit contends that the firm used “a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” to create a performance-ranking system.
The plaintiffs stated that, by design, the productivity metrics penalized those who had used their legal right to take time away from work. All 26 employees requested or were approved to take protected leave within the past two years.
According to the lawsuit, the AI tools Meta used to evaluate employees included, among others, a dashboard that tracks their level of AI usage and keystroke and mouse data, browser history, and messaging, which Meta began using to train its own AI models in April. The company announced the monitoring program in an internal post in a secondary group instead of the official employee channel and many workers did not receive an acknowledgement or consent option, the 26 employees state.
In other words, it’s alarming that Meta isn’t only using its employees’ work to train the AI tools that may eventually take their jobs—the company is allegedly applying similar tools to a discriminatory layoff process.
In a statement, Meta said the former employees’ claims were incorrect: “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
The former employees are asking the court to order Meta to halt their terminations and have an independent auditor review the company’s selection process for its layoffs.
