Meta employees launch protest against mouse-tracking tech at US offices

By Katie Paul

The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner’s offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move.

“Don’t want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?” they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters.

The pamphlet distribution comes about a week before Meta is set to lay off 10% of its workforce.

It is the most visible sign to date of a nascent labor movement brewing inside the social media giant, as at least some staffers begin to channel their rage over the company’s plans to reshape its workforce around AI into labor-organizing efforts.

For months, Meta employees have seethed on internal platforms and online forums over the company’s plans for deep layoffs this year — which it confirmed to staffers more than a month after Reuters first reported them — and the introduction of mouse-tracking software that many employees see as tantamount to helping design their own bot replacements.

META DEFENDS TRACKING SOFTWARE

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, asked for comment on the matter, pointed Reuters to an earlier statement the company had issued on the mouse-tracking technology.

“If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people ​actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” it said.

The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying “workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions.”

In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union.

The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL “Leanin.uk,” a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace.

A UTAW representative confirmed the UK campaign to Reuters.

“Meta’s workers are paying the price for management’s reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them,” said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW.

(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Matthew Lewis)