It appears that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta may have developed an interesting strategy for maintaining its dominance in the Big Tech market.

One former employee suggested the social media company deliberately hired unnecessary staff and paid people exorbitant salaries for doing nothing. Meta’s alleged motivation for this absurd policy was to choke off the supply of workers for potential rivals.

The practice of over-hiring as a kind of sneaky monopolistic dirty trick may be ending, though, as layoffs surge throughout social media companies.

As Fox News reported Wednesday, Madelyn Machado was a career strategist at Meta, but by her own admission, work is not the word for what she did.

In a TikTok video, Machado posted a caption about "Getting paid $190k to do nothing at Meta."

As a recruiter who started working for Meta in the fall of 2021, Machado said she was told she would not hire any new employees for six months to a year after beginning in the job.

Machado’s whole team and its boss were new employees, with the same lack of expectations for productivity.

"What did we do all day?" the recruiter said in the video. "That is a great question."

Instead of finding new talent, they spent their time on meetings, training and “onboarding,” a term the Society for Human Resource Management defines as integrating new hires into an organization.

“They have a really amazing onboarding and training, the best onboarding and training I’ve seen from any company ever,” Machado said.

"The most that we did, and this is the crazy part, is we had so many team meetings," she said. "Why are we meeting? We're not hiring nobody. Just to hear how everybody else isn't hiring anybody?"

Machado apparently didn't mind that, concluding, "I really miss it. I wasn't doing s***, pretty much."

WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers may find offensive.

@maddie_macho Replying to @laurendaniellehtx those were the days man. *sigh* #meta #layoffs #google #workingintech #metalayoffs ♬ original sound - Maddie | The Career Finesser

What she did not appreciate was the way her social media posts were scrutinized by her employer.

In another TikTok video, Machado discussed getting fired after six months with Meta. Apparently, she was “talked to” three times about her oversharing on TikTok, tried to proactively quit and then was fired the next day.

Before being terminated, Meta’s legal department reviewed 20 of Machado’s TikToks with her and grilled her on whether they were appropriate.

It is creepy that we are all under such surveillance all the time. Social media privacy violations have become an international concern.

Still, Machado continued to share professional advice on social media even after her employer made it clear those very public actions were considered a conflict of interest with her job duties. For a recruiter given months of training on company culture, she did not seem to have much of a sense of decorum.

Machado tried to make it a First Amendment issue.

"Why would you risk your six-figure tech job just so you can post on social media?" she said in another post, according to The Blaze. “Sharing career content isn't worth it. Freedom, being able to help women double and triple their salaries [over] helping companies lowball candidates, spend more time with my daughter as a single mom."

Machado had a theory on how she and others wound up with such cushy positions with Big Tech. She said every recruiter she knew was interviewed by Meta.

"They had the most recruiters out of everybody, and they were doing that so they could hire all the talent, and if no other companies had great recruiters because they were all doing nothing, getting paid $200-400-500 thousand dollars at Meta to do nothing, they’re not going to your company. That’s true, it worked, it was a great strategy,” she said.

The biggest of the Big Tech companies snapping up all the talent to freeze out any upstarts is an intriguing theory. And Meta might not be the only one playing that game.

We now know Twitter was overstaffed when Elon Musk took over. The exposure of the questionable bloat there might have helped expose the larger scheme.

It’s not capitalistic to have a company grow to the size where it can budget millions of dollars to stifle the competition from even getting off the ground by buying up all the talent. It’s more like a trust in need of busting.

All the Big Tech giants should be looked into as monopolies and broken up so that competition can work in the social media business. It’s not too strong to suggest the future of our liberty and rights are at risk from the centralized control over communication.

However, as bank crashes and waves of layoffs rock Silicon Valley, capitalism might be reintroducing healthy competition in the tech world sooner than we think.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.