How Watermelon Cupcakes Kicked Off an Internal Storm at Meta

In late May, Meta invited New York staff to what it called a “summery showcase” to learn about clubs across the company. Its promotional poster featured colorful slushies and watermelon desserts.

But when a club for Muslim workers revealed plans to spend $200 in company funds to serve nine dozen cupcakes in watermelon colors at the event, Meta management called the offering disruptive and demanded the group go another route—such as “traditional Muslim sweets,” a staffer overseeing internal community relations wrote in a chat to an organizer. “Watermelon references or imagery should not be included as part of materials or giveaways (e.g. cupcakes).”

The dispute over workplace treats, which two employees described to WIRED and a third posted about publicly on Instagram, is emblematic of the deep ruptures carved across the tech industry by the ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Watermelon for decades has been a stand-in for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation because its colors match the Palestinian flag. The fruit’s symbolic usage has grown since the latest fighting broke out last October. Jewish and Israeli tech workers have felt targeted as pro-Palestinian rhetoric and symbols sometimes get interspersed with what they view as antisemitic or anti-Zionist hate.

Meta deemed the planned watermelon cupcakes a violation of its ban on workplace discussions about war or statehood, though its New York cafeteria served fresh watermelon slices the day of the club fair and many times since. In the end, green cupcakes with pink frosting and black pearl topping (which didn’t look much like watermelon) were served.

“I am deeply concerned and tired of the exorbitant internal censorship at Meta, that is now hinging on absurdity,” Saima Akhter, a data scientist at Meta involved in the proposed cupcake offering, wrote on Instagram on May 29 after the company squashed the plan.

She is among 15 Muslim and Arab workers across multiple tech companies who tell WIRED or expressed on social media that incidents like the cupcake dispute have left them feeling unsupported by their employers. They worry this has translated into poor product decisions that harm some users. “How can I trust that we as a company can moderate content on our platforms equitably for our users, when I see how we moderate content internally—in a discriminatory and absurd manner,” Akhter wrote in her post.

Meta fired Akhter two weeks later, which two sources say makes her one of at least four pro-Palestinian employees it let go since October 7 for various internal policy violations. Akhter declined to comment for this story, but in a public post on Instagram she said that Meta fired her for making a personal copy of a 47-page internal document compiled by employees about allegedly biased treatment of Palestine-related content on the company’s services. It described translation errors that went unaddressed, AI-generated WhatsApp stickers that portrayed Palestinians as terrorists, the disabling of users’ pro-Palestinian fundraisers, and discrepancies between how the company responded to the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, a former employee says.

Meta also declined to comment for this story. But in a previously unreported company-wide message from June 4 seen by WIRED, Meta’s chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, wrote that the tech giant “decided to limit discussions around topics that have historically led to disruptions in the workplace, regardless of the importance of those topics—this includes content related to war and statehood. Some topics are, simply put, off-limits.” She wrote that Meta had considered the importance of personal expression and supporting or educating colleagues, but “landed on policies that prioritize conversation … that can be discussed without disturbance or distress.”

Workers are frustrated that the crackdown on conversation about Gaza has suppressed not only potential expression of support for Palestinians, but also what they view as legitimate efforts to investigate and demand fixes to reported issues in Meta’s services affecting pro-Palestinian users. “Our concerns are not being addressed,” one employee says. Most workers spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from their employers.

In February, Meta fired Ferras Hamad, a machine learning engineer of Palestinian descent, after he tried to determine whether an algorithm had wrongly labeled Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza’s content as pornographic, which has cost Azaiza viewership on Instagram. Meta accused Hamad of violating its user data access policy, which bars employees from working on accounts of people they know personally.

Hamad has said he’s never met Azaiza and sued Meta for wrongful termination and other causes in June. His firing came just before he was to earn a significant amount of Meta shares, according to the lawsuit. Azaiza’s account still doesn’t show up when searching for his name in Instagram; results instead are fan or spam accounts. Meta has yet to formally respond to the lawsuit.

Jenn Louie, an operations manager at Facebook from 2018 to 2020 who is now at Harvard University researching the interplay between morals and innovation, says management at tech companies have focused too much on risk mitigation to protect the corporation and too little on facilitating uncomfortable discussions to protect their most vulnerable employees. The days of distancing oneself from global conflict under the premise of being an “employer” are gone, she contends.

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Meta employees point to several recent internal episodes as evidence of bias. As an experiment, a member of Meta’s Muslim employee resource group posted in the group’s internal forum encouraging members to commemorate International Nakba Day, the annual May 15 commemoration of the mass displacement of Palestinians. The post used nearly identical language to one about International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on January 27, that remained up. Meta removed the Nakba post, according to Meta4employees on Instagram and two workers WIRED spoke to.

Three employees have filed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints regarding the removal of their content under the CEE policy, a former employee says. Meta declined to comment on the alleged complaints.

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Meanwhile, Arab and Muslim workers expressed disappointment that last month’s World Refugee Week commemorations inside Meta included talks about human rights projects and refugee experiences and lunches featuring Ukrainian and Syrian food but nothing mentioning Palestinians. (WIRED has viewed the internal schedule for the week.)

They were similarly dismayed that Meta’s Oversight Board, which advises on content policies, wrote in Hebrew, but not Arabic, to solicit public comments about the Palestinian human rights expression “from the river to the sea,” including whether it’s antisemitic. An Oversight Board spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

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The disputes over Meta’s response to Gaza discussions have had cascading effects. In May, Meta’s internal community team shut down some planned Memorial Day commemorations to honor military veterans at the company. An employee asked for explanation in an internal forum with over 11,000 members, drawing a reply from Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, who wrote that polarizing discussions about “regions or territories that are unrecognized” had in part required revisiting planning and oversight of all sorts of activities.

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