Abortion, guns, vaccines: Meta apparently bans employees from controversial debates

Meta HR manager Goler takes action and bans employees of the Facebook group from discussing controversial political issues in the workplace.

Abortion, guns, vaccines: Meta apparently bans employees from controversial debates

Meta HR manager Goler takes action and bans employees of the Facebook group from discussing controversial political issues in the workplace. You have to make "a number of cultural changes" to meet priorities.

In the future, employees of the Facebook group Meta should no longer have discussions on controversial political issues such as abortion, gun control or the effectiveness of vaccines while at work. This was reported by the US magazine "Fortune", citing an internal instruction from Meta HR Manager Lori Goler.

According to the report, Goler writes to all employees in an internal forum that the company is introducing new rules that dictate what is considered appropriate discussion in the workplace. "As Mark recently mentioned, we need to make a number of cultural shifts that will help us deliver on our priorities," Goler wrote, citing company founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The disadvantage of this is that you will no longer allow any kind of expression of opinion in the workplace. "We believe this is the right thing to do for the long-term health of our internal community."

The Meta leadership has repeatedly been accused of favoring a certain political camp and of manipulating the Facebook news feed algorithms accordingly. Republicans in the US House of Representatives accused Facebook of suppressing reports of possible misconduct by Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, according to its own control body, Facebook is also too lax about hate speech and misinformation on its platform. Suzanne Nossel, member of the "Oversight Board" of the online network of the newspaper "Die Zeit", said Suzanne Nossel, according to the preliminary report, is currently only insufficiently able to get "the destruction of public discourse" under control. At the same time, the committee criticized the special treatment of celebrities with many followers on its website.

They are more likely to have infringing content stay on the platform longer. The reason is the so-called "cross-checks", in which posts from certain users are not automatically deleted immediately, but are first subjected to a manual check. The lack of transparency in this process is also of concern.

Therefore, 32 suggestions for improvements have been developed. The recommendations of the "Oversight Board" are not binding for the Facebook mother Meta. However, the company must respond to them. According to the panel, the US group has asked to extend the period for this from 60 to 90 days in the current case.