Twenty-six current and former employees of Meta are suing the social media and technology company claiming it used artificial intelligence (AI) to target employees who were on leave during the company’s last round of mass layoffs.
Those tools didn’t take into account 26 employees who were on medical, family, or parental leave, or employees who had disabilities, the suit claims. Those employees are federally protected from firing under the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides employees with up to 12 weeks of protected leave for the birth of a child, serious medical condition, or other qualifying contingency.
Certain state laws, such as the California Family Rights Act, provide the same provisions, while the California Fair Employment and Housing Act prohibits companies from using automated decision-making systems that can produce discriminatory results based on disability, gender, or pregnancy.
“Meta did not neutralize those inputs for protected leave; did not exclude protected-leave-takers or accommodation-seekers from the selection cohort; and did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires,” the 71-page suit alleges.
The AI algorithms used to select terminated employees not only failed to account for federally protected leaves but disproportionately scored workers who were on leave, effectively penalizing that group of employees, the suit alleges. The 26 employees were based in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent Meta from formalizing their terminations pending an independent audit of the algorithm process used to assist with the employee termination process.
“Once these terminations are finalized, the harm to Plaintiffs cannot be undone by money damages alone,” the suit states.
“For employees presently on a leave, every day that goes by constitutes additional harm, in that Meta is taking away the entire purpose of a protected leave—to heal, to care for family, and to have protected time away from work to do so.
“An employee undergoing significant medical treatment, or caring for a days- or weeks-old newborn, or providing around the clock care for a family member—i.e., exercising their rights to the purposes of these protected leaves—cannot also be told that during this exact same time period they must look for new work.”
The list of plaintiffs includes a manager working remotely in Florida who was on maternity leave; an engineer in California who took leave in 2025 and 2026; a scientist in California on paternity leave; and a manager in Illinois on medical disability leave.
The Epoch Times reached out to Meta for comment on the suit but did not receive a response before publication time.
According to the lawsuit, Meta’s AI-assisted systems captured and compiled extensive communication and documentation on terminated employees, including their screen content, keystrokes, mousing, browser history, messaging, and email data from Meta-issued devices. Many employees also used their company-issued devices for personal and confidential matters, so Meta was also collecting data on their personal banking, health insurance, mental health and leave-related issues, the suit claimed.
The practice received strong internal opposition, with more than 1,000 employees signing a petition demanding that Meta stop the employee data-collection process, the suit states. Meta paused the program on June 22 after it was revealed that personal employee data was accessible companywide during a security breach.
“[A] tremendous number of employees [were] feeling anxieties about their futures,” Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said during a question-and-answer session about the data collection process, according to the suit.
“It’s all bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat that,” he said.
