Facebook pitched language suppression tool in workplace chat product to employers – report

New ‘benefits’ of Facebook Workplace reportedly include a feature that helps employers prevent workers from unionizing. The social media giant seems to be joining other Big Tech companies with anti-union bias.

The Intercept reported the suggestion was made in an internal presentation and one anonymous Facebook employee saw the blacklisting “as a clear effort to give employers the ability to exert control over employees.”

Facebook Workplace is the tech giant’s answer to Slack, and allows employees to collaborate and chat with one another.

The internal presentation, now reportedly taken offline, was met with backlash online.

Karandeep Anand, a product manager for Facebook Workplace, apologized for the choice of words in the presentation, stating internally that it was caused by “lack of context versus bad intent from anyone on the team.”

The blatant attack on employee rights and free speech comes two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg defended the platform’s hands-off approach to President Trump’s tweets. At the time, the decision was met with ire, with Facebook workers publicly denouncing the platform’s laissez-faire approach to President Trump’s Tweets.

Facebook Workplace is used by all manner of businesses including Walmart and Starbucks. It is also used by the Singaporean government.

The presentation comes at a time when Facebook is looking to win over offices due to increasing levels of working from home due to Covid-19.

What the blacklisting also does is add the company to the list of employers increasingly leveraging on technology to suppress unionization.

In April, it was reported that Amazon’s Whole Foods was using a heat-map tool to track stores it thought were most at risk of unionizing.

In fact, in Silicon Valley, it seems that anti-union sentiment runs deep. According to the National Law Review, it wasn’t until February 2020 that big tech company workers actually organized a union for the first time.

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