When the Supreme Court made their extremist originalist decision about the 14th amendment and abortion rights, my company changed. Women and non-binary people discussed our anger and sadness in our community room. My next meeting had discussions about which country would be best for fleeing America’s growing fascism. My CEO sent out a heartfelt email. The HR team held an emergency meeting on Zoom for people to voice their concerns and answer questions. This is the right response to half of the population losing the right to their own body.
At Meta, they instead cracked down on any discussion of abortion, let alone the decision reversing Roe v. Wade.
A sign of things to come, perhaps, from the company that controls a large percentage of speech on the internet. Now we know where Meta stands on the issue of reproductive freedom.
By enforcing silence, they stand against it.
Employee Report Abortion Bans
“On our internal Workplace platform, moderators swiftly remove posts or comments mentioning abortion.”
– Ambroos Vaes, Meta engineer on LinkedIn
Internally, Meta employees are not allowed to talk about the latest Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. They’re not even allowed to discuss abortion. According to employees, any posts that even mention abortion are swiftly removed. Sheryl Sandberg posted about the horrors the Supreme Court just forced upon people, and Facebook employees can’t even link to her post.
Among engineers in my friend group, many wouldn’t consider a job with Meta. We know it as the place that makes hateful tools that enable insurrectionists to gather and harassment online. We know Meta (then “Facebook”) directly contributed to genocide, perhaps even as the driving factor. People who have a problem with things like genocide and violent coup attempts avoid Meta. What remains is a disproportionate number of people who also want to control other people’s bodies. Perhaps Meta is just worried about scaring away the only talent they can get anymore.
Meta has declined to comment.
A Worrying Future for Meta’s Services
Meta controls the largest chunk of social media space, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The company recently changed its name from ‘Facebook’ to show how it was more than just the one social networking site. Also, possibly, to escape the vile brand image of Facebook as a privacy thief and source for violence, like genocide and insurrections. Meta’s been working hard to make sure people know Facebook’s reputation came from the company’s decisions, not its name.
With Meta in charge of so much of social networking, it’s worrying to see how their decision making works. People are having their rights stripped from them and aren’t allowed to talk about it with their coworkers. People’s coworkers often are their support network. We spend as much time with our coworkers as we do our families, maybe even more time. For many, they’re the people you rely on and trust. A lot of my closest friends are former coworkers.
It’s so dangerous to see Meta choose to oppress people who can get pregnant further. By silencing them, they’ve placed another restriction on people who can get pregnant. Yet another right violated. Neutrality in the face of oppression isn’t neutrality, it’s oppression.
The same company that found the need to oppress people further also controls a huge chunk of the world’s speech. While a company can control what’s on their sites, and rightfully so, it’s worrying to see that company side with fascist authoritarianism. Though they’ve done this before. Women, LGBTQ+ people, non-white and especially Black people, have all pointed to harassment on social media that the companies do nothing to prevent. Perhaps it’s because they don’t believe our concerns matter.
This Isn’t Politics, It’s Life
Abortion isn’t a legitimate political issue. No matter how much the right wing lunatics try, people aren’t political. Your gender is not “political.” A person’s body is not “political.” The right to control your own body is inalienable. Politics is not a discussion about which people are legally afforded the rights of a “full person.”
Meta (Facebook), like many tech companies, has a dearth of female and AFAB employees. There just aren’t enough people with decision making power at Facebook who also may have to decide about how they’re going to get an abortion. In some way, Meta is a microcosm of the United States. A group of mostly men, including two alleged sexual abusers (one an alleged rapist), appointed by a man who defined himself as a sexual predator, and a mostly-male congress, just decided to take the right to control one’s own body from a population they are not a part of. At Meta, that’s just men telling women to shut up.
Like we haven’t heard that before.
By banning abortion discussions, Meta didn’t take a neutral side. They chose the side of the oppressor. No bar too low for Meta.
Sources:
- Mike Isaac and Ryan Mac, The New York Times
- Sam Tabahriti, Business Insider