Meta Lays Off The People Who Got You Addicted To Their Platform

— and now they’re trying to go viral like the rest of us.

Former employees were reportedly escorted out of Meta headquarters last Friday with boxes full of A/B-tested retention strategies, heatmap printouts of your attention span, and a binder titled:

“How To Make A Teenage Girl Check Instagram 147 Times a Day Without Technically Breaking Her Brain.”

The layoffs targeted the same individuals responsible for designing the exact psychological loops that keep your thumb twitching toward your phone at stoplights, funerals, and mid-argument.

“These were the true visionaries,” said one anonymous senior VP.“When we asked, ‘What if we gave users a short-term sense of connection that would ultimately isolate them?’ they said, ‘Let’s make it look like a story with a rainbow ring around it.’ And for that, we’ll always be grateful.”

Sources confirm that the layoffs came just hours after Meta stock surged, fueled by the announcement of a new AI model that can simulate your friend’s face, voice, and political rage spiral — effectively replacing both your actual community and the engineers who designed it.

“Yeah, I made the algorithm that knows exactly when you’re about to go to sleep, then pings your ex’s new selfie,” said former engagement engineer Rowan T.”

At press time, Meta was interviewing AI models to replace the laid-off staff — systems trained on a dataset that includes:

• Your deepest desires

• Your most shameful online searches

• That one weird phase you had in 2015

• And your subconscious fear of being left out of a group chat

  
  

  

“They’re cheaper. They don’t unionize,” said Meta’s interim head of automation.“And best of all — they don’t need likes to feel alive.”

But the layoffs haven’t stopped the hustle. Many former addiction engineers have now launched Substacks, coaching packages, and reels offering ‘authenticity tips’ as they pivot to become influencers on the very platforms they architected.

“At first I felt betrayed,” said one former UX researcher turned personal brand coach, “but now I get to wake up every day and be my truest self online: unregulated.”

In a final gesture of irony, one recently unemployed machine learning specialist posted a viral Instagram carousel titled:“5 Ways to Hack the Feed I Helped Design.”Slide 5 was just a mirror.

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