(The Lion) — Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, eliminated tampons from its men’s bathrooms, but liberal employees have pushed back.
To protest a Meta policy last month that took tampons out of the company’s men’s bathrooms, some employees have stocked these bathrooms with tampons from home.
The Meta announcement last month irked some workers who identify as transgender and non-binary.
“The sanitary products were emblematic of the quiet rebellions that Silicon Valley workers have staged as they grapple with the rightward shift of their bosses,” the New York Times reported.
The tampon removal policy from Meta came around the same time owner Mark Zuckerberg announced various policy changes that shifted the company rightward.
Meta also ended its fact-checking program across its social platforms, something critics long argued over-policed conservative content and had a liberal bias.
Facebook also eased its so-called hate speech policy, eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and ended its transgender chat themes.
Additionally, Zuckerberg said last month that his platforms received immense pressure from the Biden administration to censor content.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on his podcast. “It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.’”
The Facebook founder also pushed back against efforts to demonize masculinity in America.
“It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad,’ and I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the – the kind of – the spectrum,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
Though Zuckerberg endorsed noone in the 2024 presidential election, he attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as did other tech giants like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and X owner Elon Musk.
Politically, Zuckerberg identifies as a classical liberal, according to the New York Times.
Zuckerberg has acknowledged that accusations of political bias have hurt his company’s standing and it will take years to fix.
“I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand is back to the place that it could have been,” Zuckerberg said last year, according to the New York Times, “if I hadn’t messed up in the first place.”