Meta employees sue on allegations company used AI to target workers on medical, parental leave for layoffs

If this lawsuit holds up, it's a nasty little case study in what happens when a company decides an algorithm can do its dirty work for it. Twenty-six employees say Meta used keystroke monitoring and AI-driven performance scoring to flag people who were on medical or parental leave, then folded them into a mass layoff. You don't need to hate Big Tech on principle to find that ugly. You just need to imagine being the new mother or the guy recovering from surgery who logs back in and finds out the system already decided he was expendable while he wasn't typing.

The defense you can already hear coming is that the algorithm is neutral, it just measures activity, and less activity during leave produced lower scores. That's the whole problem. A tool that can't tell the difference between "slacking off" and "legally entitled to be away from the keyboard" isn't neutral, it's just automating a decision nobody wants to sign their name to. Companies love AI for exactly this reason: it launders a judgment call into a data output. Nobody in HR has to say "we're cutting the guy on leave," the model just spat out a low number.

Meta will say performance, not leave status, drove the cuts. Maybe some of that is true. But federal law doesn't care how the scoring got done if leave status ended up baked into the input. The FMLA doesn't have an AI exception, and it shouldn't get one just because the discrimination now runs through a model instead of a manager's gut feeling.

This is the part of the AI conversation that keeps getting lost in the hype cycle. We spend so much energy debating whether these systems will take over the world that we barely notice them quietly reshaping who keeps a paycheck right now, with zero transparency about how the scoring actually works. A layoff algorithm is still a decision, and somebody still has to own it. If Meta let software target people for using benefits the law guarantees them, that's not innovation. That's just an old, ugly move wearing a new jacket.