The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index currently awards Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, a score of 100. The perfect mark reflects Meta’s commitment to “supporting an inclusive workplace culture, and corporate social responsibility related to LGBTQ+ issues.” That number is likely to drop amid reports of “total chaos” behind the scenes, as Meta employees reel from new content moderation policies that allow users to claim LGBTQ+ individuals have “mental illness.”
Additionally, users can now call transgender or nonbinary people “it” without consequence and are free to refer to women as “household objects or property.” The abrupt changes have not gone over well internally, to put it lightly.
Internal discussions, revealed by 404 Media, along with interviews from current employees, highlight widespread dissatisfaction at the social media giant. Some LGBTQ employees have reportedly taken time off for mental health reasons and are considering resigning.
“Morale of fellow queer employees is in the absolute sh**ter, surprising no one,” one employee said.
Related: What Meta’s New Hate Speech Rules Mean For You
Another told the site, “It’s total chaos internally at Meta right now,” adding, “It’s embarrassment and shame that feels self-inflicted, different than mistakes the company has made in the past.”
“No one is excited or happy about these changes. And obviously the employees who identify as being part of the LGBTQ+ community are especially unhappy and feel the most unsupported in this,” said another employee.
Other dissatisfied employees decried the absence of internal discussion regarding how the new changes were decided.
“I think it’s clear that the policy team is not open to any feedback here and is committed to an ideological project that sacrifices some of our communities in order to achieve their goal,” one employee posted to the company’s internal messaging site, according to 404. “Just call me a tra*ny and close the discussion here. At least it would be honest,” they added.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited overly trigger-happy censorship algorithms in his video announcing the changes, before getting to the real reason: “The recent elections… feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
Meanwhile, Meta employees continue to write messages like this on the internal server: ““I’ve never felt so strongly that we’re on the wrong side of history. This will cause so much harm.”
We’ll be checking that HRC score for an update.
