Former head of civil rights at Meta criticizes the discrepancy between the manifesto by Zuckerberg and the company's practices
Former vice president for civil rights at Meta Roy Austin criticizes the manifesto “The Future is for Everyone” by Mark Zuckerberg for the discrepancy between promises of ethical AI and the company's practices – eliminating ethics teams and lobbying against AI regulation.
Roy L. Austin Jr., former vice president for civil rights at Meta and now director of the Howard Law Artificial Intelligence Initiative, published a critical response in Tech Policy Press on 13 August 2026 to the manifesto “The Future is for Everyone”, which Mark Zuckerberg released on 10 August 2026. According to Austin, the manifesto promises a future that will “improve all our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety”, and discusses distributing superintelligence widely among people and equalizing power. Austin, however, points to a discrepancy between these promises and actual practices at Meta.
Austin notes that in March 2023, in the document “Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency”, Meta ordered nontechnical teams to be streamlined in favor of a “more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles”, which he says weakened teams focused on responsible and ethical AI – including the civil rights team, which he himself led. He voluntarily left Meta in March 2025. According to him, the document lacked terms such as responsibility, fairness, ethics, equality, or human and civil rights. He further states that Meta, in his words, spends tens of millions of dollars on campaigns against politicians who support introducing AI regulation, which he contrasts with the manifesto's stated goal of “equalizing power”.
Austin also questions how realistic the promise of free access to AI tools is given the digital divide (according to him, 22 % of Americans do not have broadband at home and 33 % of people worldwide have no internet access at all), and highlights the risks of advertising-funded products. He also mentions that Meta recently withdrew from the RE100 renewable energy initiative because of extensive use of natural gas for data centers, which he says contrasts with the manifesto's promise to be “water positive” by 2030. He also criticizes the passage about aligning AI with the values of the individual rather than the company, pointing out that, according to him, Meta weakened its community standards under pressure from the White House and that the company's open models are not bound even by this weakened standard.
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Why it matters
The text is an opinion piece by a former insider, rather than a product or regulatory announcement, so it has no direct practical impact on ordinary users of AI tools. For companies and professionals following AI governance, however, it provides a concrete example of how the public ethical rhetoric of a major AI company compares with documented actions – cuts to nontechnical and ethics teams and spending against politicians advocating regulation – which is relevant when assessing the credibility of similar statements by other companies.
Relevant practical impact
What this means
For a business
The case illustrates the risk of a discrepancy between a company's publicly declared AI ethics and its actual actions (eliminating ethics teams, lobbying against regulation) – relevant to companies addressing their own AI policy communication and compliance risk.
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