US technology giant Meta was sued collectively by 26 employees, revealing the use of AI tools to implement selective discrimination in layoffs
Meta has recently been involved in legal disputes over alleged algorithmic discrimination in layoffs. On July 13, local time, 26 Meta employees formally filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Oakland, California, accusing the company of using an artificial intelligence (AI) evaluation system to conduct "selective layoffs" for employees who were on statutory leave such as maternity leave, sick leave, or were disabled. This is one of the large-scale AI layoff disputes that broke out in the high-tech industry, triggering widespread public attention on corporate algorithm monitoring and artificial intelligence discrimination. Algorithms become “tools” and vulnerable groups are purged The indictment pointed out that in a layoff plan involving 8,000 people (about 10% of its total employees) announced by Meta in May this year, Meta secretly implemented a performance evaluation system led by AI technology. The system relies on multi-dimensional indicators such as keylogging, behavior monitoring, AI usage frequency, and algorithm-assisted performance rankings to automatically score and rank employees and generate a layoff list accordingly. The plaintiff’s lawyer emphasized that the indicator setting of this algorithm system itself has serious flaws. Since employees who take leave due to illness, pregnancy or disability are objectively unable to generate activity data such as "number of keyboard strokes" during their leave, the system automatically determines these leave behaviors as "performance decline" without any weighting or elimination of protective leave, resulting in a very high proportion of employees at the above stage being included in the layoff list. The plaintiff pointed out that this move seriously violated many federal and local laws that protect the basic rights and interests of workers, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Pregnant Women’s Labor Equality Act. Employees face multiple infringements on their rights and urgently apply to the court for preservation It was revealed that all 26 plaintiffs had applied for statutory protective leave or disability adjustment services from the company. Among the group of plaintiffs, nearly half took leave due to childcare or pregnancy reasons, including 8 women taking maternity leave and 4 men taking parental leave. Since the layoff and separation process is scheduled to be officially launched on July 22, the plaintiff is currently applying to the court for an emergency temporary injunction, requesting that the existing employment status be maintained before the labor arbitration proceedings are concluded. The plaintiff’s lawyer pointed out in the court statement that once the labor contract is terminated, these employees who are in the period of pregnancy, postpartum recovery and active treatment will immediately lose their employer-subsidized medical insurance, and their unvested equity will also be forcibly deprived. The resulting harm cannot be undone by simple financial compensation. Meta strenuously denies the accusation, arguing that "decisions are made manually" In response to the above-mentioned accusations, a Meta company spokesperson firmly denied them in an interview, claiming that the plaintiff's accusations had "no factual basis." Meta reiterated that the company has never used AI systems as a basis for decision-making when evaluating its human resources structure and making organizational optimization decisions. All layoff decisions are manually evaluated and ultimately made by management. Currently, both parties still disagree on the actual operating mechanism of Meta's AI evaluation system and whether there is "algorithmic black box" discrimination. The court will further review the application for a temporary injunction in this case.