Meta Used AI to Target Disabled and Pregnant Workers for Layoffs, Lawsuit Claims

Dozens of workers are suing Meta over claims it used AI to identify workers for mass layoffs, with those taking disability or maternity leave disproportionately targeted.

The lawsuit, filed in California on Monday on behalf of 26 employees, alleges that a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems” was used to sack people by looking at their keystroke and activity monitoring data.

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” it reads.

The lawsuit points to the company’s recent layoff of 8,000 workers, and alleges that Meta used AI to assess workers’ productivity but did not take into account time off for medical reasons or because they were due to give birth.

“The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalised the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves,” the complaint said.

One of the plaintiffs was told she was being laid off just two days before she gave birth, despite the fact she had been approved for pre-birth pregnancy leave. Another is an engineer who received a “lowered rating” because he took time off for an injury.

A Meta spokesperson told the Guardian the claims in the lawsuit “lack merit and are not based on fact,” adding that “workforce management and organisational decisions were and are made by people, not AI”.

Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, introduced an AI employee-monitoring program this year to capture keystrokes, mouse activity, browser history, messages, emails and location data on company devices.

​“The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said in an internal meeting.