Staffers are moving to billionaire-friendly Texas, thanks to Meta

Mark Zuckerberg: How Facebook, Facebook, and Instagram have come a long way toward addressing misinformation and hate speech in the wake of the 2016 election

It wasn’t explained why people who live in Texas would be less prone to bias than people who live in California. This was just the latest in a series of moves—including elevating former Republican operative Joel Kaplan to chief global affairs officer and adding combat-sports promoter Dana White to Meta’s board—that seem to indicate the company is vying to get into the good graces of the new administration. President-elect Trump appreciated the announcement. “Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way—Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said, noting that the change was “probably” made in response to his threats against Zuckerberg.

In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video.

Zuckerberg meanwhile blamed the “legacy media” for forcing Facebook to implement content moderation policies in the wake of the 2016 election. “After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. “We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,”

In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost “free expression.” The changes that were put in place by Meta would let freedom be unleashed, as it became too extreme in the way it restricted the speech of users.

Silicon Valley’s luminaries have been grovelng in an unseemly way since Donald Trump won the presidency on November 5. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”

A New Rule for Over-Moderation of Social Media Content and its Sensitivity to Anti-Demonstration and the First Amendment

Meta announced Tuesday that it is abandoning its third party fact-checking programs on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and replacing its army of paid moderators with a Community Notes model that mimics X’s much-maligned volunteer program, which allows users to publicly flag content they believe to be incorrect or misleading.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan said, though he did not detail what topics these new rules would cover.

In order to simplify the policy, we are going to eliminate restrictions on things like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

Meta was criticized for taking a hands off approach to moderation of content related to high profile elections around the globe.

Kaplan also blasted fact-checking experts for their “biases and perspectives” which led to over-moderation: “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

However WIRED reported last year that dangerous content like medical misinformation has flourished on the platform while groups like anti-government militias have utilized Facebook to recruit new members.

In September, Musk officially moved X’s headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, where his other companies, Starlink and the Boring Company, are also based. The reason for the move was cited by Musk at the time. Users can now claim that gay and trans people have mental illnesses after the new policy changes at Meta.

But the move to Texas may have more advantages than just political posturing. Texas is one of two states—the other is Florida—with a law essentially forbidding moderation of a great deal of content on social media platforms. The regulatory system is very friendly to companies. The owner of X and centibillionaire, Mr. Musk, led the way.

Nicole Gill, the executive director of Accountable Tech, says that they’re obviously following Elon Musk’s lead. It’s not by the signal that they should move their base of operations to a state perceived to be a Republican or conservative-coded state.

Florida’s similar law made its way to the Supreme Court after being challenged in lawsuits. The case has been returned to the lower courts after an appellate court ruled that the First Amendment does not apply to social media companies. But Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the free speech nonprofit Free Press, says that this environment could be favorable for companies as they roll back content moderation, and could form the legal basis of a challenge similar to Netchoice.