Meta employees question the company's removal of posts on its internal forum: 'This is a free speech issue'

• Meta enacted rules that bar employees from discussing politics, health, and weapons at work.
• The rules, dubbed, Community Engagement Expectations, restrict mocking protected categories like race.
• Some employees formed CEE Watch to monitor post-removals and enforcement transparency.

Some Meta employees are questioning the company's removal of their posts and comments from its internal forum.

Employees created a group on its internal forum Workplace to share their experiences in posts that have been seen by Business Insider.

In 2022, Meta rolled out new internal rules banning employees from discussing contentious topics such as politics, health, and weapons. The guidelines, which Meta calls Community Engagement Expectations (CEE), also ban comments and posts that are seen to mock a protected category including race, gender, and religion.

Some Meta employees have accused the company of using the CEE system to censor valid discussions. Some staff recently created an internal employee resource group called CEE Watch for Meta staff to flag when a post has been removed, according to internal documents seen by Business Insider.

"CEE language is intentionally vague and we cannot know how it's being enforced without openly sharing our violations with each other," reads a welcome post on the CEE Watch page.

The CEE Watch group had over 800 members, at the time of publishing, representing a small fraction of Meta's 72,000-strong workforce.

A Meta spokesperson said the company doesn't remove internal employee comments just because it doesn't agree or like them. The person noted that many critical comments remain up on Meta's internal communications boards.

One employee wrote that multiple posts regarding Palestine have been removed over the last year. The person questioned how employees can engage in discussions of "what are acceptable forms of identity to discuss at work."

Another person commented and said that it's been an "open secret" in the "Muslim@" employee resource group that posts that were "relatively" harmless (e.g., posts about someone grieving their family member from Gaza) getting removed."

Another added that their post about grieving family members who had been killed was removed.

While free speech is a fundamental constitutional right in public spaces, it does not extend to private corporations. As private entities, companies have the legal authority to establish their own policies regarding what employees can or cannot say in the workplace.

The CEE guidelines were last updated in October 2024, according to a copy viewed by BI.

It states that it is "not okay" for employees to share content that has "potential to trigger disruptive comments" around topics including: "Political movements or causes relating to states, nations, or people (e.g., opinions on forms of governments, political systems, or economic systems; sharing national flags in ways that imply opinions on political movements or causes or slogans like 'Free Puerto Rico'; 'Liberate Hong Kong'; 'Make America Great Again'; 'Build Back Better'; 'Free Palestine'; or 'Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow!')."

In a separate post titled "communications around LGBTQ healthcare and health plans," one employee said they asked Meta's employment law group if LGBTQ+ employees and their children would continue to have access to gender-affirming care after Meta's public benefits page removed mention of it.

The person said they "heard back that there were no plans to update the plan, but that they would comply with applicable laws."

Another person said a Drag act performance group, which had previously performed for its one of the company's pride employee resource groups (ERG) was investigated by the company and later banned because they claimed the group violated the CEE guidelines. The person said the performance was live-streamed across the ERG and was met with positive reviews.

"This feels like a disproportional punishment for this performer and impacts their livelihood," the person wrote. "I'm currently escalating this case now, but I thought it would be helpful to share that CEE also applies to guests of Meta (apparently even retroactively too)."

In a comment under his post, the original poster claims that during his in-person conversation with the internal community relations team, "they said that 'those kinds of people are high risk for violating content' (referring to drag performers). I left the conversation extremely upset."

The person shared a message from the internal community relations team which said the drag act group's performance in 2022 violated the CEE and other company policies, "including multiple remarks degrading about various protected categories, and multiple instances of sexual content shared."

Meta employees are increasingly vocal about the company's content moderation on its internal forums, with some directly challenging what they view as censorship of workplace discussions.

"This is a free speech issue," wrote one employee after their post linking to a news article about Donald Trump saying that Meta's CEO was "probably" changing the company's direction in response to previous threats to jail him, was removed by Meta's internal moderators.

The employee questioned how Meta, a company meant to be "hardened against threats," could restrict internal discourse about its own leadership.

A six-year employee in Meta's Civic Integrity team described deteriorating trust between leadership and staff.

"When you tell people they should resign if they don't agree with your decisions, this belies a lack of trust in your people," they wrote, laying bare tensions over recent policy changes.

The CEE guidelines state that "consequences for violating this policy vary depending on the severity of the violation and other context such as a person's prior conduct." It lists disciplinary action, including termination of employment, as one example of consequences.

The crackdown appears particularly acute in Reality Labs, Meta's virtual reality division. One employee noted the irony of having "Debate Openly" as a core principle while facing content removals.

"Attempts to even have the most polite discussion that acknowledges how people are responding to policy changes... have been taken down," they wrote. They also expressed concern about potential retaliation in Meta's upcoming layoffs for discussing workplace conditions.

More employees wrote about a climate of fear around posting, with content sometimes being removed within minutes without explanation.

One worker described colleagues deleting comments and self-censoring "because they were afraid they might be targeted by CEE and management for even reacting positively to a post."

"I have very mixed feelings about Meta at this point," wrote the Civic Integrity employee, a sentiment that was shared across multiple posts.

"The greatest value of this company is not its products or its technology but its people. They make all of it possible. The leadership of this company maybe understood that at some point, but they seem to have forgotten it."

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