October continues to be a month Facebook likely wishes it could forget. First came Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who explained in chilling detail how the site and its algorithms are designed to profit off what she called “the spread and amplification of hate, misinformation and political unrest.” Then there was its massive outage — the longest period the site (along with Instagram and WhatsApp) has been down due to “programming issues” in more than a decade. Now, the social media giant is also facing an HR crisis, forced to pay millions to settle claims that the company routinely discriminated against U.S. workers in its hiring practices.
CNN’s Christina Carrega reported that “Facebook will have to pay more than $14 million to settle a case that alleged U.S. workers were denied employment because it reserved jobs for foreign workers with temporary visas in 2018 and 2019.”
According to Carrega, “the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in December 2020 against Facebook for allegedly reserving jobs for temporary visa holders through the permanent labor certification program and using recruitment methods to deter U.S. workers from applying to certain positions.”
