Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has put a restriction on its employees regarding the discussion about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on internal communication channels of the company. The company has asked its employees not to discuss abortion rights internally.
Meta’s excuse to not discuss abortion rights
According to New York Times, Meta issued a memo on May 12—after the draft opinion was leaked to Politico—saying that “discussing abortion openly at work has a heightened risk of creating a hostile work environment” so it “would not allow open discussion” among employees. One of the company’s policies has put “strong guardrails around social, political, and sensitive conversations.”
Criticism
Ambroos Vaes, a A software engineer of Meta, talked about the restrictions of the company, on LinkedIn. Times spotted the post which reads, “On our internal Workplace platform, moderators swiftly remove posts or comments mentioning abortion,” Vaes said in the LinkedIn post. “The ‘respectful’ communications policy that was put in place explicitly disallows it. Limited discussion can only happen in groups of up to 20 employees who follow a set playbook, but not out in the open.”
It is not the first time Meta has restricted its employees from discussing an issue. Earlier the company updated its Respectful Communication. In 2020 after the murder of George Floyd the company instructed the employees to stop discussing political and social issues in company-wide Workplace channels.
In this hour, Meta is being accused of banning employees from discussing abortion rights internally. But Meta is doing something which can dilute bad names in the media. According to Engadget, “On Friday, Meta also told employees it would reimburse the travel expenses of employees in need of access to out-of-state healthcare and reproductive services “to the extent permitted by law.” That’s a policy many tech companies, including Google, had in place before Friday’s decision and that they reiterated after the Supreme Court announced its ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.”
