The Philip DeFranco Show - (BONUS) Meta’s Secret Layoff Algorithm Exposed

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

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Via rail, love the way. This massive AI layoff lawsuit against meta that you're seeing, it's worse than a lot of people realize. And also, what happens with it could be much bigger. And if you haven't seen, more than two dozen meta employees filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that it used AI to tag them for layoffs, despite the fact that they had already been approved for protected leave

and accommodations. According to the lawsuit, you had meta using what the plaintiffs are calling a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems to pick and choose who got the pink slips after they announced 8,000 people were getting laid off back in May. And they say that meta use systems like AI performance ratings as well as key stroke and activity monitoring data. And what you see is that the lawsuit's big point is that they say that meta didn't pass the list through a human who knew the circumstances before they gave people to boot. Or with the lawsuit reading, the result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected

leaves, but in effect, penalize the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves. Because let's say you have a baby and you go off for paternity leave, or you leave for bereavement, or I don't know, a bunch of other completely legal justified reasons. While you're out, you're not exactly the most productive employee on the staff. And so if all an AI system does to determine someone's value to company has track keystrokes, then yeah, no shit. Someone who's taken off time to care for their newborn, they're not going to rank very high. And it also doesn't seem like they're exaggerating. Eight of the women included in this lawsuit had taken maternity or pregnancy-related leave. In fact, one of those women was a,

scientist who was approved for pre-birth pregnancy leave who was told she got laid off two days before giving birth. And also four more plaintiffs were men on paternity leave and one was a woman who took leave to care for a family member and then later took bereavement leave. And you've got a number of these stories. One of them that was a manager who was barely two weeks into his medical leave when he got the notice. And you've got all 26 of these plaintiffs either taking protective leave or having received reasonable accommodation for disability. Which just to be very clear here, if you do not know, it is actually very, very, very illegal to terminate people for that. Because of things like the family and medical leave act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Pregnities Act and the

Pregnancy Discrimination Act. And because, at least according to this lawsuit, no human review the AI's productivity ratings in order to factor in protected leave, Meta violated those laws. Which then brings you to what the employees are actually asking for, which is mostly just keeping their jobs pending an independent audit of the algorithmically assisted selection process. So as far as Meta's response, it can kind of be boiled down to nah-uh, because you had a spokesperson saying these claims lack merit and are not based on facts. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI. So yeah, we'll see how that plays out, But what's even crazier is that this is not a new problem.

In fact, you might have seen or experienced a rise in what's been called algorithmic management for years now. As far back as 2019, you've had Amazon using an automated system that tracks every individual worker's productivity and automatically generates warnings or even terminations without any input from supervisors. And what's important to mention that managers do technically have the ability to override that decision, it isn't clear how often that actually happens. And we're talking about tons of people losing their jobs. Between August 2017 and September of 2018, 300 people were fired due to to a lack of productivity from just one facility and most of that process was automated. Now of course, Amazon's pushed back on the idea that people can be fired by a computer with a statement saying it absolutely isn't true that they would fire someone through an automated

system and adding. We would never dismiss an employee without first ensuring that they had received our fullest support, including dedicated coaching to help them improve an additional training. Which for many, I think, will end up feeling like kind of old lady clutching her pearls energy from a multi-billion dollar corporation that would later then go on to implement that same process in other areas of their operation. Right in 2021, One, you had Bloomberg reporting that Amazon's flex delivery program was managed and monitored nearly entirely by machines. Did the driver get to the delivery station when they said they would? Did they complete their route in the prescribed window?

Did they leave the package matching where the customer requested? All of that, it's tracked and then filtered into performance patterns to determine whether that driver should get more routes or be deactivated. And of course, the explanation from those close to the definitely not evil overlord Jeff Bezos is that he believes that machines make decisions more quickly and accurately than people, which reduces costs and gives Amazon a competitive advantage. But what that doesn't do is make things better for people like 63-year-old army veteran Stephen Normandon, who spent four years running his ass off, delivering packages as a contract driver. All just to get an automated email saying that he wasn't productive enough and he got fired. And he was even saying that he was punished for things outside his control, like locked department complexes,

telling Bloomberg that he took the termination hard and that he's very proud of his work ethic that he learned serving in the army and dadding. I'm an old school kind of guy and I give every job 110%. This really upset me because we're talking about my reputation. They say I didn't do the job when I know damn well I did. and saying there are a lot of things the algorithms don't take into consideration and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. And despite the fact that you had Stephen waking up at 3 a.m. to do his routes, having stellar ratings and being asked to train other drivers, he still spent weeks appealing his automatic termination only to be given the runaround with really no answers. And so that meant weeks without money that he needed for bills to be paid.

And while for Stephen, things luckily turned out all right, he said to hell with Amazon, he opened a small engine repair business. Not everyone in his situation ends up with a happy ending like that. All while, other industries have also implemented algorithmic management. You have Uber, for example, they have an algorithm that determines who gets rides and how much they get paid. But also back in 2020, you had four drivers suing Uber, saying that the algorithm banned their accounts claiming wrongdoing when they hadn't actually done anything. I mean they lost as much as 70% of their income and in a more reason case, you had a driver getting assaulted by a passenger.

You had them repeatedly getting punched in the face, headbutted, and sent to the hospital kind of assault. When this guy sent a report to Uber, he found that his account had been deactivated because the passenger complained. And then even when he got hold of a real human and he got his account back, he was still left with a warning that it could be deactivated again. And so across industries, you have real people that are getting shafted for simply being humans working for corporations that would rather save a couple of bucks using a few lines of code rather than actually managing their staff. And actually all of this, it brings us to the other aspect of all this, which is guilt absolution. Right, if you have companies that can use an algorithm or AI to make their hiring and firing decisions, they can't get caught up in targeted discrimination lawsuits. Having this machine make the choice, it's kind of like trying to have a shield built it.

But again, the question becomes, is it worth the human cost? Because understand, there is a cost here. What the billionaires fail to see is like the glitches. in the system, that's real-life people falling through the cracks. You've got billionaires in their companies treating people as necessary casualties in the name of maximizing profits. Where I understand for most of them, the system is working exactly as designed. And then also with this, I'll say, depending on how this meta-a-a-law suit plays out, this could become an even bigger problem than it already is. Right, if meta, one of the biggest companies in the world, they can get away with

what's being alleged here. It is really only a matter of time before every single company, all the way down the latter, has a chatbot instead of an HR rep. Before suddenly, people's livelihoods, they're not determined by a human person who can exercise compassion, but instead a machine that kind of just cares about if your keystroke rate drops. So one, we're going to keep our eyes on this obviously for updates. Two, that is why you should like, subscribe and let me know your thoughts in those comments. Keep us in your algorithm. Three, if you want more news, I got a brand new Philip DeFranco's show. You should definitely check out that covers a number of things right here. Where we dive into how this Trump-Cuba problem is way bigger than people realize. We also go inside this young cockroaches movement that's threatening Modi's power. Tucker Carlson Russia situations hit a shocking new low. How and why a white's only society is about to get exposed.