After all, not many meta employees need to move to Texas
It is unclear whether the teams’ relocation to Texas will be more than just symbolic. Common sense suggests that moving to Texas for a person in California who shows a political preference is unlikely to immediately change their views.
In the same citizen appeal, management described the move to Texas as an attempt to address the perception problem with California. That reasoning frustrated employees, who believe Meta was harming its workforce to appease Trump, the three employees told WIRED. Meta and Trump remain in litigation in a federal court in Northern California over the temporary suspension of his account following the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump claims his constitutional right to free speech was violated. Accordingly, Zuckerberg recently met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to mediate the lawsuit The Wall Street Journal.
This week, Meta Plans revealed to cut 5 percent of its workforce from February. The company said it plans to fill those positions later this year, a move that could lead to more employees being hired in Texas. After Meta decided to end its diversity, equity and inclusion program last week, there will be no targets for hiring traditionally underrepresented groups.
Last week’s changes to hateful behavior rules allow users to voice harsher criticism, including on gender and ethnicity. During the Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg said that users can now weigh in on topics such as whether they should serve in military combat missions. Some employees have warned that Meta is now supporting the spread of misogyny and bigotry in its services, according to two of the employees.
At the town hall with employees, a senior executive defended the policy changes, saying they would open the door to a variety of perspectives, such as the ability to call men lazy on Facebook without fear of being censored, said an employee present.
As far as enforcement goes, meta is slowing down its current fact-checking programLimit the use of automated filters to suppress perceived offensive posts and encourage more political content in news feeds.
On Tuesday, twelve civil rights organizations announced that they had been advising Meta for years wrote to the company to express “serious concern” about the revised guidelines. “These changes are devastating to free speech because they expose members of protected groups to more attacks, harassment, and harm, drive them away from Meta’s services, impoverish conversations, eliminate viewpoints, and silence dissenting and often censored voices,” he wrote to the group , which includes the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Black Justice Collective.
At the Safety and Integrity Council, management did not want to commit to continuing to publish statistics about the gender and race of the company’s employees. “It’s the worst surrender,” says one.
According to three employees, individual managers have told their teams that they want to continue to push for diverse hiring opportunities.
Additional reporting by Steven Levy.
