Facebook insists new Workplace tool was for ‘preventing bullying,’ not suppressing unions

Facebook wants to empower you to make the world more open and connected as you suppress your workers’ legal right to form a union. 

The social media giant that seemingly goes out of its way to be awful set a new bar Wednesday, when, according to reporting by the Intercept, it showed off a new Workplace tool designed to prevent certain words from trending on the enterprise-focused platform. And, to make things as clear as possible during the internal meeting, it chose an example word: “unionize.”

For the blissfully unaware, Workplace is Facebook’s poorly designed answer to Slack. Companies use it to discuss projects, coordinate meetings, and share announcements. It strives to function as a digital office place that, in the middle of the remote-work explosion, is more important than ever. When a lot of employees use Workplace to discuss a specific word, phrase, or topic, it might “trend” à la Facebook’s discontinued trending news tab. Should they just so happen to discuss something an employer finds objectionable, however, this new tool would empower their boss to pull the topic from the trending list. 

We reached out to Facebook with a host of questions, both in an attempt to confirm the Intercept’s reporting and to determine what, if any, safeguards Facebook will put in place to make sure its tools are not used to suppress unions.

“While these kinds of content moderation tools are useful for companies, this example should never have been used and we apologize for it,” replied a Facebook spokesperson via email. “The feature was only in early development and we’ve pulled any plans to roll it out while we think through next steps.”  

In other words, according to Facebook the anti-union pitch was a simple error of judgement. 

Notably, the company’s on-the-record response included no commitment to not design and market anti-union tools in the future — a commitment that should be sought. After all, the implied intent behind designing a system to prevent certain topics from trending on the Workplace platform, and then providing the word “unionize” as the example of what can be suppressed, quite obviously appears to be union suppression.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s Vice President of Workplace, Julien Codorniou, claimed in a statement that the censoring tool is actually intended to combat bullying. 

“An early mock screenshot of the feature used an example of a hashtag that could be removed by an admin,” wrote Codorniou, “it was completely inappropriate and not focused on the intended use case (preventing bullying).”

Codorniou added that “this feature never launched, we’ve pulled it back & will put it through rigorous review before shipping it to customers.” 

Codorniou’s claims to the intended use case notwithstanding, according to the Intercept the internal demo “sparked a flurry of posts denouncing the [anti-union] feature.” 

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So, the next time your boss uses a Workplace tool to screw you and your coworkers over, remember that someone, somewhere inside of Facebook, might have at one point expressed their displeasure with said tool in the form of a post. 

We’re sure that will provide some much need consolation.