• Meta has enacted rules that bar employees from discussing politics, health, and weapons at work.
• These Community Engagement Expectations restrict mocking topics within a protected category, like race.
• Some employees formed CEE Watch to monitor post removals.

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 Workplace forum to share their experiences in posts that have been seen by Business Insider.

In 2022, Meta rolled out internal rules barring employees from discussing contentious topics such as politics, health, and weapons. The guidelines, which Meta calls Community Engagement Expectations, also ban comments and posts that are seen as mocking topics related to a protected category, such as race, gender, or religion.

Some Meta employees have accused the company of using the CEE system to censor valid discussions. A number of staffers recently created an internal employee resource group called CEE Watch so that Meta staff could flag when a post has been removed, according to internal documents seen by BI.

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

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

A Meta spokesperson said the company didn't remove internal employee comments just because it doesn't agree with or like them. They added that many critical comments remained up on Meta's internal communications boards.

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

Another person commented, saying that it was an "open secret" in the "Muslim@" employee resource group that "relatively" harmless posts had been removed.

A different person added that their post about grieving slain family members 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.

But US employees are allowed to discuss wrongdoing by their companies and other workplace-related issues, like safety, harassment, and accommodations for people with disabilities.

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

They say it's "not okay" for employees to share content that has the "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 performance group, which did an act for one of the company's pride employee resource groups, was investigated by the company and later banned because it claimed the group violated the CEE guidelines. This person said the performance was livestreamed 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 the post, the original poster claimed 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)." The poster added: "I left the conversation extremely upset."

This person shared a message from the internal community relations team that said the drag 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," one employee wrote after one of their posts was removed by Meta's internal moderators. It linked to a news article about Donald Trump saying that Meta's CEO was "probably" changing the company's direction in response to Trump's previous threats to jail him.

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.

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

One employee in Reality Labs, Meta's virtual reality division, said it was ironic to have "debate openly" as a core principle as posts were removed.

"Attempts to even have the most polite discussion that acknowledges how people are responding to policy changes" were deleted, they wrote. They also expressed concern about whether there would be retaliation in Meta's coming layoffs for discussing workplace conditions.

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

One worker said colleagues deleted comments and self-censored "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," the civic integrity employee wrote, 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," this employee said. "The leadership of this company maybe understood that at some point, but they seem to have forgotten it."

Are you a Meta employee? Got insight to share? Contact the reporter Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or via Signal at jyotimann.11. Reach out from a nonwork device.

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• Mark Zuckerberg addressed several recent policy changes in a company all-hands meeting on Thursday.
• Zuckerberg admitted that the company was slow to respond to TikTok's rapid growth.
• The CEO also told employees to "buckle up" for an "intense" year ahead.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the company was slow to respond to TikTok's meteoric rise because executives didn't view it as truly social, offering a rare window into how the tech giant missed one of social media's biggest shifts in recent years.

"When I look back on TikTok, I think part of the reason why we were slow to it is because we didn't think TikTok was social," Zuckerberg said in a recording of an all-hands meeting obtained by Business Insider. "We looked at it and we thought, 'Oh, this is like, a little more like YouTube.'"

The admission came in response to an employee's question about whether Meta's current focus on artificial intelligence might cause the company to miss the next major social media trend, as it did with TikTok.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Zuckerberg explained at the meeting that Meta's traditional view of social interaction — centered around friends posting content and commenting — caused the company to initially misread TikTok's appeal. The company failed to recognize how users were sharing TikTok content through private messages, which has become a crucial form of social interaction across Meta's platforms.

"Because we were too dismissive up front, it wasn't just about people commenting in the feed. It was about people seeing stuff in their feed and then sharing it into message threads," Zuckerberg said, referring to the company's instant messaging platforms WhatsApp, Messenger, and direct messaging in Instagram, where "the majority of social interaction is happening."

Zuckerberg also addressed TikTok's uncertain future in the US. President Trump signed an executive order on January 20 that gave TikTok 75 more days to operate in the US, as owner ByteDance will either have to divest from TikTok or it will be banned in the US.

"We don't have control of what's going to happen to Tiktok," Zuckerberg said. "We have a lot of competitors, but they're an important one. So, who's gonna own Tiktok at the end of the year? What's gonna happen? I mean, that's a pretty big deal, something that's a card that we get to turn over."

Looking ahead, Zuckerberg emphasized that the company needs to avoid taking "too narrow of a view" of social interaction as it navigates the emergence of AI. He outlined a vision for AI-powered features in Facebook and Instagram feeds, including interactive AI agents that users can converse with and more immersive content experiences.

"I think the next trend here is there're going to be things that either AI can produce, that we can just put in there... I think this year we're gonna have stuff where it's like, okay, you have an AI agent, and you can just start talking to it," Zuckerberg said.

The Meta chief also pushed back against concerns that the company's AI investments might detract from its core social media business, noting that as a large company, Meta needs to be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time."

"If we can't build Facebook and [the] next platform at the same time, then, like, eventually game over," he said.

Do you work at Meta? Contact this reporter from a nonwork email and device at [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also reach him securely via Signal at +1408-905-9124. Your identity will be protected.