Meta to move content moderators to Texas as part of plan to end fact-checking program

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta is moving its content moderators from California to Texas to reduce bias concerns, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted to Facebook Tuesday morning.

The move is part of the tech giant's plan to end its third-party fact-checking program.

Meta is set to replace its fact-checking initiative with Community Notes, a feature that allows users to add fact checks as context to what they consider misleading posts. The social media platform X has implemented a similar feature in recent years.

Zuckerberg said Meta will also be removing some content restrictions from its platforms on topics like immigration and gender.

Meta did not immediately respond to questions about how many employees would move to Texas or how the company expects the move will improve the teams’ operations.

Samuel Woolley, the founder and former director of propaganda research at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, said Meta is likely following X’s playbook in cutting back on content moderation and moving moderators to Texas.

“This decision to move to Texas is born out of both some practicality and also some political motivation,” Woolley said. “The perception of California in the United States and among those in the incoming [presidential] administration is very different than the perception of Texas.”

He added he worries that removing fact-checking from Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, would “remove one mechanism for supporting democracy on that platform.”

Zuckerberg isn’t the first big tech CEO to move some of his team’s operations to Texas. In July last year, Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk moved the company’s headquarters to Austin in 2021. He also announced plans to move X and SpaceX from California to Texas.

Meta’s relationship with Texas has been rocky at times. In July last year, Meta was forced to pay the state $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit in which the tech giant was accused of using personal biometric data without users’ authorization.

Meta’s efforts to roll back its fact-checking systems come as the company is trying to mend bridges with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. Facebook banned Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots; in recent months, Zuckerberg has grown closer to the president-elect, with Meta donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. And on Monday, Zuckerberg announced he was adding Dana White, a key Trump ally and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to Meta’s board.

Zuckerberg directly referenced Trump in Tuesday’s video, saying that Meta would “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

The decision to end the fact-checking program is a full circle moment for an initiative that began in December 2016 in response to claims of online misinformation attached to the presidential election that year, which Trump won. Zuckerberg said the fact-checkers since then have been “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created.”

Also on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan — Meta’s new chief global affairs officer — criticized President Joe Biden’s administration during a Tuesday interview on “Fox and Friends for “pushing for censorship.” Zuckerberg has previously said that he felt pressured by the Biden administration to censor COVID-19-related content in 2021.

Disclosure: Facebook has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.