Meta moderators were already in Texas before Zuckerberg announced move, say ex-workers
Source: The Guardian
Mon 13 Jan 2025 15.40 EST
Last modified on Mon 13 Jan 2025 15.47 EST
In a carefully worded statement, Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta was moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and that the company’s content review “is going to be based in Texas”. The thrust of these teams’ work is to ensure that Facebook and Instagram users do not encounter hate speech, pornography and violent content.
The CEO said moving the moderators to the Lone Star state “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”. It was part of a larger announcement that Meta was ending its factchecking program, easing content restrictions and focusing on “free expression”. Moderators are separate from Meta’s factchecking efforts, which were done by third parties.
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.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/meta-moderators-texas-zuckerberg-trump
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