Multiple news outlets have reported that the social media giant Meta is planning to cut 5% of its workforce. According to the New York Times, the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change in an internal memo to workers. “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” the memo reportedly read. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
Meta only recently went through a round of layoffs in 2023, which Zuckerberg had declared at the time would be the “year of efficiency.” In the span of six months, Meta laid off 21,000 workers and eliminated 5,000 open positions, effectively getting rid of 30 percent of the company’s workforce. At the same time, top leadership at the company, including Zuckerberg himself, moved away from its headquarters in Silicon Valley, managing large portions of the tech giant from New York, London, Tel Aviv, and in Zuckerberg’s case, Kauai.
According to publicly available data about Meta from September of last year, the company employs more than 72,000 people, which would bring the total layoffs from the recent announcement to around 3,600 employees. The memo also stated, according to the Times, that the laid off workers would be replaced by 2026.
The move comes after Zuckerberg announced in a public message last week that Meta would end the third-party content moderation system governing its platforms – which include Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – in favor of a Community Notes system, much like X (formerly Twitter). Zuckerberg said in a statement announcing the change that under the company’s previous policy, “a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”
While there are many critiques of the content moderation system Meta put in place after the 2016 election (then known as Facebook), its biggest failures were due to lack of oversight, not too much of it. Meta has acknowledged the role its platform played in fomenting violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, an ongoing genocide that has seen thousands killed and over a million displaced. The company’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation also allowed the Stop the Steal movement and its violent rhetoric to grow on the platform, culminating in the attempted insurrection on January 6th at Capitol Hill by Trump supporters, according to internal documents turned over to the SEC.
Meta has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, and Zuckerberg will be hosting a black-tie event that night for the newly inaugurated president alongside Republican donors Miriam Adelson and Todd Ricketts.
