Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today

'Intense year' ahead, warned Zuck. Got to spend billions on AI and work to stay out of Trump's bad books

Meta has confirmed to The Register that today marks the start of a mass redundancy process with thousands of workers getting the chop.

Word of looming job cuts emerged last month when CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a leaked memo that he intended to “move out low-performers faster” and “raise the bar on performance management.”

Some 5 percent of the workforce is being erased, equating to roughly 3,700 jobs. The business employs 74,067 people, according to an annual report for calendar 2024 [PDF] which Meta filed recently.

In January, Zuckerberg described 2025 as an “intense year” for Meta, which involves massive AI investments that include hiring more machine learning engineers.

Notices were dispatched to staff this morning. "These are performance terminations which were already announced in mid-January," a spokesperson told us. Asked about staff being notified this morning, the representative replied that was "accurate. They start today."

The highly profitable social media biz declined to make further comment.

Speaking of Facebook... Legal action brought against Meta by authors, who claim the internet giant unlawfully stole their work to train its AI, is getting spicy.

It's alleged, using freshly unsealed emails as evidence, that the Facebook goliath obtained its training data after torrenting "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen ... Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."

"The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing," the scribes claimed. The tech giant denies wrongdoing.

Meta is planning to spend $60 billion on AI development in 2025, and after sinking billions into virtual reality despite a so far questionable outcome, the company will also focus on smart glasses.

Confirmation of the personnel purge comes weeks after Meta confirmed it was expunging fact checking in the USA to prioritize free speech as Donald Trump returned to the White House as President. Zuckerberg said:

In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.

This had nothing to do with any concerns that Zuck might have had about Trump’s return to political power or the comment Donald previously made. In his book called Save America, published in September, Trump accused Zuckerberg of being nice to his face but plotting behind his back.

“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” he wrote. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

A few months earlier in July, still smarting from his election defeat to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump said of the Meta CEO: “All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never before seen, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT ZUCKERBERGS”.

Similarly, Meta’s decision to scale back diversity, equity and inclusion programmes had nothing to do with cosying up to Donald Trump, following his decision last month to nuke 60 years of anti-discrimination regulations.

Meta reported $62.36 billion in net profit in 2024 [PDF] up 59 percent year-on-year, on the back of a 22 percent rise in revenue to $164.5 billion. No doubt investors will cheer today’s confirmation of job cuts, just as they did when Zuckerberg last swung the axe in the years following the pandemic.

In late 2022, Meta tossed 11,000 people on the employment bonfire and then another 10,000 joined them the following year. Meta claimed it hired too fast in the Covid 19 crisis and said business reality no longer matched costs.

The latest cull pertains only to staff that have worked at Meta long enough to qualify for a performance review. ®