As part of Meta’s sweeping changes to content moderation announced today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the company will also be moving its content moderation teams from California to Texas to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” he wrote on Threads.
“We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas,” Zuckerberg says in a video about the changes. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Meta’s decision to move its content moderation teams to Texas follows Elon Musk bringing X and SpaceX to the state, though Musk’s move was driven in part by his opposition to a California law that’s intended to support LGBTQ+ students. (Employees who work for Meta in Texas will be subject to bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors along with one of the country’s most stringent abortion bans.)
Meta’s other moderation changes include ditching its independent fact-checking program in the US in favor of an X-inspired Community Notes feature, removing restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, and bringing back civic content to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
The company’s blog post about the updates was written by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief.