The staff were moved to Billionaire-Friendly Texas by Meta
Facebook is Letting the Dobermans Out! Donald Trump Ends the New Era after the Covid-19 Pandemic in November
With just under two weeks left until former president Donald Trump becomes President Donald Trump, Meta has announced that the company will be fully moving its trust and safety teams—the people responsible for enforcing policies around hate speech and disinformation—to Texas. It will be modifying its fact-checking program. The decision will help remove the concern that biased employees are excessive in censoring content, said CEO Mark Facebook in a post.
In the letter to Jordan, the former CEO stated that he would no longer be associated with either political party. He wants to be neutral and not play a role either, or even appear to be playing a role. It all goes out the window now that Trump is in office. He said in yesterday’s video that he felt like we were in a new era. Apparently, it’s an era where private companies change their rules to ensure they’re in sync with the party in power. In the last week alone, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replaced the company’s former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, with a former GOP operative and clerk of the late Justice Anthony Scalia, who once urged Facebook to ignore misinformation during the election. The president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a supporter of President Trump, was invited to sit on Meta’s board.
Zuckerberg first indicated that he might be OK with the term in a simpering letter he wrote last August to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, saying that the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The content remained, which shows that Facebook does not have to be subservient to the government. In his post on Wednesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the term to refer to the entire practice of moderation. He promised that they would reduce the amount of censorship on their platforms. An alternate reading might be—we’re letting the dobermans out!
Meta has significantly rolled back the fact-checking and get rid of content moderation policies it had put in place in the wake of revelations in 2016 about influence operations conducted on its platforms, which were designed to sway elections and in some case promote violence and even genocide.
Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”
Moving Social Media to Texas: Removing Bias on Fact-Checking Programs and Reducing High-Severity Violations
Meta said on Tuesday that it is abandoning third party fact-checking programs on its social media sites, and replacing them with a Community Notes model that mimics X’s much-maligned volunteer program.
Kaplan did not say what topics his new rules would cover, but they would allow more speech by removing restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focused on enforcement of high-severity violations.
“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.
Ahead of last year’s high profile elections, Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation.
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.
Meta will be moving from California to Texas as part of a plan to remove bias. While we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust in where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
The move to Texas may have more advantages than one might think. 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. It has a regulatory system that is friendly to companies. And, as usual, X owner and centibillionaire Elon Musk has led the way.
Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech said that they’re following in the footsteps of Musk. “Just by the signal [sent by] moving their base of operations from what is perceived to be a liberally biased state—it’s not—to what’s perceived to be a Republican or conservative-coded state.”
Lawsuits challenging the legislation and Florida’s similar law made it to the Supreme Court in 2024, in Moody v. Netchoice. The case was brought back to the lower courts, where an appeals court previously ruled that social media companies didn’t have the right to censor speech under the First Amendment. According to the senior counsel of Free Press, the environment in which companies roll back content moderation could be an opportunity for a legal challenge similar to Netchoice.