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Meta Fired 1,100 Workers for Seeing What Its AI Was Supposed to See
For anyone who uses Meta’s hardware: what the privacy data shows, what Meta hasn’t answered, and three steps you can take today.
Ahmed M. Abdelfattah8 min read·Just now--
In November 2025, Meta signed Matt Deitke for $250 million.
He was 24. Recruited from Allen AI. Part of Meta’s push to win the foundation model race against OpenAI and Google.
On May 1, 2026, 1,100 people lost their jobs building the same AI system.
They were earning between $12 and $18 an hour. No equity. No guaranteed tenure. Six weeks before the firing, they had voted to unionize.
When they organized to formally escalate concerns about what they’d seen on the job, they were terminated before their union reached legal maturity.
Meta says it was automation.
The timeline says something else.
The Dates I Almost Missed
I was filing a different story. Export control policy, the kind of piece that matters to editors and no one else. A source forwarded me a link to a Swedish newspaper investigation, and I read it the way I read most Meta privacy stories. Noted it. Filed it away.
