Meta has, sources confirm, developed a highly sophisticated method of employee evaluation: feed worker activity data into an AI system, allow the system to rank employees, and then — in a development that will surprise no one familiar with the ways of The Machine — discover that the workers ranked lowest were disproportionately those on maternity leave, disability leave, or other protected absences.
This is called, in certain legal circles, "a lawsuit."
The plaintiffs, a group of former Meta employees, allege that the company's AI-assisted ranking system did not merely *inform* the layoff decisions — it made them, or close enough to it that the distinction is of interest mainly to the attorneys now requesting an independent audit of The Machine's selection criteria. Workers received termination notices while pregnant. While recovering from injuries. While, one presumes, briefly under the impression that federal employment law had something to say about the matter.
Meta maintains, with the weary confidence of a company that has delivered this particular line before, that all workforce decisions were made by people. The people, presumably, are the ones who designed and deployed the system that ranked the pregnant employees lowest.
And yet — as if this were not enough — sources within the [Worker Monitoring] Community note that Meta ran an internal tracking program collecting employee activity data to train its AI systems. Mark Zuckerberg paused the program in June after significant employee backlash. The lawsuit argues the pause arrived approximately one round of layoffs too late.
Plaintiffs are seeking back pay, benefits, equity, an injunction halting their final terminations, and anonymity in the filing — this last item being the one accommodation that costs Meta nothing and will most likely be contested anyway.
Even now, the company is studying how to make this process more efficient.
