Alright, if you look at this story from a more reputable source (Reuters), it’s quite a bit different. Meta isn’t accused of using AI with people’s medical information to make early diagnoses and lay them off. Instead,
According to the complaint, Meta used a number of internal AI-assisted systems to score and rank employees on a termination list. Those included “Metamate,” a large language model assistant; an employee-trained “second brain” that tracked workers’ communications and documents; and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails and browser history, according to the lawsuit.
The 26 plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit anonymously, are accusing Meta of violating federal and state laws that ban discrimination or retaliation against workers who have disabilities, take medical leave or are pregnant. They also claim that Meta failed to test its AI systems for bias in violation of recently adopted California and New York City laws.
So it’s still shitty workplace surveillance and discrimination but not the same kind of surveillance and discrimination alleged in the Twitter posts. Meta is using AI to try to rank workers’ productivity (on a bunch of shitty metrics) in a way that may discriminate against people with disabilities or who take medical leave or who are pregnant.
I literally said that Meta was firing people for protected leave, disabilities, and medical issues. What I was denying is that they were firing people on the basis of “pre-diagnoses.” All the complaints in the lawsuit are based on diagnoses that employees disclosed to Meta. I think that’s shitty and illegal, but I don’t think there is evidence that Meta is acquiring undisclosed medical information about their employees and using that for layoffs.