Amazon Downplays DEI, Meta Plays Up Free Speech as Tech Tilts Right
Mark Zuckerberg’s shakeup of Meta’s content moderation practices this week is just one of many efforts by tech leaders to adapt to a new political era.
Like most big technology companies, Amazon began publishing pages and blog posts on its corporate website in recent years declaring its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion along with other issues. Over the past few weeks, though, some of those webpages have been undergoing curious makeovers—or disappearing altogether.
For example, a page outlining Amazon’s stances on a variety of political issues as recently as mid-December mentioned that the company would “continue to advocate for protections and equal rights for transgender people” and that it also provided gender transition benefits to its employees, according to a record of the site on the Wayback Machine. Since then, however, the company has updated the page to remove the word transgender and the mention of gender transition benefits, though it does refer to Amazon’s belief in the importance of equal treatment for LGBTQ+ people, and the company still offers the transition benefit to employees.