Meta restricts open debate of Roe v. Wade & deletes abortion-related messages

• Friday, Meta instructed its employees not to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.
• Messages in team discussions that violated the policy were deleted, according to The New York Times.
• A Meta software engineer stated on LinkedIn that the policy “explicitly disallows” the topic of abortion.

The New York Times stated that Meta has advised employees not to debate the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on its internal system and is deleting communications that do so.

The newspaper said that managers highlighted a policy that placed “tight boundaries around social, political, and sensitive conversations” in the workplace.

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In a LinkedIn post, Ambroos Vaes, a software engineer at Meta, expressed his disappointment that the matter was not permitted to be discussed. “On our internal Workplace platform, moderators swiftly remove posts or comments mentioning abortion.”

Vaes added: “The ‘respectful’ communications policy that was put in place explicitly disallows it. Limited discussion can only happen in groups of up to 20 employees who follow a set playbook, but not out in the open.”

According to a May 12 corporate document acquired by The New York Times, numerous internal posts about abortion were removed for breaking the firm’s harassment policy. The policy was the source of numerous complaints to HR.

On Friday, the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the case that legalised abortion nationwide nearly fifty years ago, and returned the issue to the states.

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According to a memo seen by The Times, Meta had previously permitted open discussion of abortion, but later determined that it caused “significant disruptions in the workplace given unique legal complexities and the number of people affected by the issue.”

However, Meta said it would reimburse travel expenses “to the extent permitted by law” for employees who needed “to access out-of-state health care and reproductive services,” The Times reported.