Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is moving moderators out of California to combat concerns about bias and censorship
Meta
- Meta is moving its safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas and other states.
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the shifts would help address concerns of bias and overcensorship.
- Zuckerberg's Meta appears to be following the lead of Elon Musk's X in prioritizing free speech.
Mark Zuckerberg is moving Meta's platform security and content oversight teams out of California, and shifting staff who review posts to Texas, in a bid to combat concerns about liberal bias and overcensorship at his social-media empire.
The CEO of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads' parent company said on Tuesday that the moves would help return Meta to its "roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms."
Zuckerberg wrote that Meta would "move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content."
California is widely recognized as a progressive state while Texas is traditionally conservative. Zuckerberg likely hopes that shifting oversight of his social networks to red states like Texas will help assuage claims that blue-state liberals are silencing conservative voices because of their left-wing bias.
Meta's chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, confirmed the changes in a blog post, writing that the company will relocate the teams "that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations."
He told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday that Meta was seeking to "rebalance" and "rebuild trust" among users who felt their perspectives were not wanted on its networks.
"We want to make sure that they understand that their views are welcome and that we're providing a space for them to come onto our platforms, engage, express themselves, engage in the important issues of the day or not in the important issues of the day and just whatever it is they want to talk about and share," Kaplan said.
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Zuckerberg, Meta's billionaire cofounder and largest shareholder, also laid out plans to replace fact-checkers with Community Notes. He will also lift restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, ease overall censorship and instead focus on stopping illegal and severe policy violations, return civic content to users' feeds, and work with President-elect Trump to resist pressure from foreign governments to make US companies censor more.
Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in late 2022 and rebranded it X, has made free expression a priority on his platform and spearheaded the use of Community Notes as a substitute for fact-checking and censorship.
Musk also shut X's headquarters in San Francisco last fall in favor of operating the company out of Bastrop, Texas.