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CNN
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Meta aims to cut about 5% of what it calls its “lowest performing employees” and plans to fill those positions later this year, the company confirmed Tuesday.
These job cuts could affect around 3,600 workers, according to Meta’s latest quarterly report citing a workforce of 72,000 in September.
“I have decided to raise the bar on performance management and eliminate poor performers more quickly,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal memo seen and first reported by Bloomberg. A company spokesperson confirmed the accuracy of Bloomberg’s report to CNN.
“We typically manage people who don’t meet expectations over the course of a year,” he continued, “but now we’re going to make deeper reductions based on performance during this cycle.”
The announcement comes during a period of unrest and rapid policy change from Zuckerberg. Two weeks ago, Meta replaced its top politician with a prominent Republican. And last week, the company announced that it was ending its third-party fact-checking programs in the United States and changing its hateful conduct policies, allowing certain new types of content on owned platforms. in Meta which were previously prohibited. Some of this content refers to “women as household objects or goods” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it’,” according to a section of the updated policy.
And just three days ago, Meta ended its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The same day, Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying he had been working on these company changes “for a long time” and that excessive content moderation and fact-checking was “destroying trust” in the platform.
“I think in 2016 and after, I gave too much deference to a lot of people in the media who were basically saying, ‘Okay, there was no way (Donald Trump) got elected without misinformation.’ People can’t really believe this stuff,” Zuckerberg said.
Critics of these recent policy changes say they are being used to curry favor with President-elect Trump and the new administration.
Meta has seen significant layoffs since the Covid-19 pandemic. It laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022 and thousands more the following year.