Facility Managers across Meta’s Silicon Valley, Texas and New York offices were ordered to remove tampons from men’s washrooms. The tampons were earlier provided for non-binary and transgender employees, according to the New York Times.
Meta is seen to have undergone a few changes in it’s polices in recent days. In fact, not just tampons, Zuckerberg also instructed to remove sanitary pads from men’s bathroom in it’s offices. The move is seen as a parallel effort to reshape its internal and external company policies and to align Meta with Trump’s era of aiming to “make America great again”.
Among the changes in the company, Mark Zuckerberg also dismissed the practice of fact-checking instead Meta would put restriction on speech across its platforms including Facebook and Instagram, to “restore free expression”.
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Mark Zuckerberg admitted, “Our content moderation practices have gone too far”. The Meta CEO has also ended inclusion of diversity, equity and inclusion of DEI programmes. It had also removed transgender and non-binary themes from its messenger app, according to its employees.
According to the reports by New York Times, scrapping down of themes based on transgender communities sparked controversies within its internal employees who supported LGBTQ+ group @Pride group. Till now, atleast 1 employees has resigned. In a post in @Pride group, Alex Schult, Meta’s chief marketing officer highlighted the fact that transgender rights have been politicised. Meta CEO said, “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say that were just mainstream discourse”.
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Meta also reportedly eased its rules for posting hate statements against certain races, religions or sexual orientation. It also worked on the policies on mental illness on gender or sexual orientation. The relaxation on speech would motivate more societal debate to come in the front and lead towards a well informed society.
In a podcast with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg denied that the changes were not made to appease the Trump government but admitted that the political discourse had changed his way of thinking.
The changes in Meta’s policy received approval by President-elect Donald Trump and censure from former President Joe Biden and from LGBTQ+ advocacy group admitting the increased online trolling.
