The Emptiness Of Zuck’s Promise To Move ‘Biased’ Trust & Safety From California To Texas

I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly appears to be just a flat out lie.

As you may recall, as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking, enable more hatred, and just generally suck up to the Trump administration, there was the weird promise that because California content moderation and trust & safety teams were too “biased,” they would be moved to Texas.

Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased. Or something.

This was stupid at the time, and in practice, it appears to be absolute garbage. As many people (including us on Ctrl-Alt-Speech) pointed out, Meta already has a large trust & safety team in Texas.

Former Facebook employees say, however, that the move-to-Texas announcement rings hollow. That’s because Meta already has major content moderation and trust and safety operations in the state. They say the move is nothing more than a blatant appeal to Donald Trump. Facebook’s former head of content standards said he helped set up those teams in Texas more than a decade ago.

“They made a lot of hay of: ‘Oh, we’re worried about bias, we’re moving all these content moderation teams to other places,’” Dave Willner said during a Lawfare panel last week. “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, that is mostly fake.”

Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas told the Guardian the same. One said many people across Meta’s various divisions did trust and safety work in the company’s Austin offices. Another said that many content moderators, including those allocated to the trust and safety teams, have been in Austin for a long time.

So many of the people were already in Texas. What about the folks in California who were told they’d have to move? According to Wired, most have been told the mandate doesn’t actually apply to them.

Last Thursday during a town hall call for Meta employees working under Guy Rosen, the company’s chief information security officer, executives said that no one in Rosen’s organization would have to move to Texas, according to two people in attendance. This exempts from relocation employees who work on Meta’s safety, operations, and integrity teams, which collectively help enforce the company’s content policies.

The changes also do not affect a portion of Meta’s US-based content policy team, which works under chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, because many members are already located outside of California, including in Washington, DC, New York City, and Austin, Texas, the employees say. That includes key decisionmakers such as Neil Potts, vice president of public policy. Many of the company’s content moderators are contractors based out of hubs beyond California such as San Antonio, Texas.

So it sure sounds like the big announcement of how content moderation and trust & safety were moving to Texas was a load of garbage. Many of those people are already there.

The whole thing, as expected, was about making a fake public concession to Donald Trump in an attempt to curry political favor.

While Zuckerberg’s motivations here seem transparently political, the broader implications remain concerning. It’s especially worrying given how a ton of people are going around falsely claiming Zuckerberg caved to pressure from Biden, while everyone seems to be ignoring the much more blatant act of him actually caving to Trump.

Moving critical trust & safety functions to appease partisan interests sets a troubling precedent. It’s a short-sighted move that prioritizes political expediency over principled policymaking. But that’s the world Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to embrace.