Meta employees file lawsuit alleging AI redundancy selection

A group of 26 current and former Meta employees have filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming it used AI for redundancy selection.

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The suit was filed earlier this week at a federal court in northern California, and refers to the 8,000 layoffs the company announced earlier this year.

The employees claim that the social media giant used a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems” including AI performance ratings and keystroke monitoring.

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” the plaintiffs wrote in their 71-page complaint.

“Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems – including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate,’ employee-trained ‘second-brain’ agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration — to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list.”

Meta began notifying employees of a “mass reduction in force” in May, equating to around 10% of its workforce, having introduced the AI monitoring systems the month before.

The workers argue that the system, by design, excluded employees who had taken time away from work so did not have as many metrics to measure against as other employees.

Employees who had taken “protected leaves” such as maternity leave would therefore be disproportionately selected for redundancy.

The system “in effect penalised the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves”, the complaint added.

All of the plaintiffs requested or were approved protected leave in the past 24 months.

In a statement, Meta said the claims “lack merit”. “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI,” it added.

Dr Ilia Kolochenko, a lawyer and founder of cybersecurity ImmuniWeb, said that regulating AI to prevent such issues could “inevitably produce more harm than good”.

“Sadly, banning or overregulating the use of AI in HR will merely aggravate both intentional and unintentional discrimination,” he said.

“Automated HR systems have existed for many decades, assisting organisations to make decisions on their workforce.

“With the current trend to restrict or even entirely ban AI in HR decision-making processes, most organisations will either conceal the use of AI or shift back to non-AI systems, especially in those jurisdictions that have no GDPR-like protection against automated decision-making on human subjects (with or without AI).”