Facebook faces federal investigation for alleged racist hiring practices

Social Media giant, Facebook is under Federal government scrutiny once again.

A U.S Federal Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, has opened a “systemic” probe into Facebook’s alleged racial hiring and promoting history, Reuters reported. That “systemic” designation enables the EEOC to devote more resources to the investigation, which could potentially result in a lawsuit against the Social Media giant.

The recent development follows a July 2020 complaint against Facebook filed by Oscar Veneszee Jr., a Black Facebook employee whose job includes recruiting people of color to work for the company, according to the report. Veneszee told NPR that Facebook has a “Black people problem,” with a workplace culture that is not conducive to retaining Black employees.

Veneszee filed the complaint alongside two Black recruits, who also alleged that they had not been hired because of being black.

CNBC reported last year that many big tech companies, including Facebook, Apple, and Twitter, had not made significant progress in hiring Black employees since 2014.

According to Facebook’s official 2020 diversity report, only 3.9 percent of its employees are Blacks.

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EEOC has not actually leveled any specific charges against Facebook yet. But the current probe raises the chances of such charges, especially after it received a “systemic” designation.

In a related development, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will again testify before Congress on March 25. They will discuss misinformation on their platforms, according to CNBC.