Meta’s trust safety team ditches California for Texas

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, etc., is moving away from third-party fact checkers to a community notes program. As part of the transformation, Meta is following the lead of Elon Musk’s X and moving its trust and safety team from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.

Community notes, user-generated notes and corrections will first be rolled out to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users in the United States. Meta says it will improve the program later this year before expanding to other countries.

In a video announcing the changes, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained why the team focused on creating content policy will operate out of Texas.

“As we work to promote freedom of expression, I think we can build trust by doing this work in a place where there is less concern about bias on our team,” Zuckerberg said.

Mehta’s fact-checking partners told Wired that they had “no prior notice” and learned of the decision from Zuckerberg’s video. Some say Meta’s changes have left a hole in their finances and they are now trying to figure out what to do.

Meta’s Joel Kaplan, who served as White House chief of staff under President George W. Bush and reportedly heads the global policy team, provided further reasons for the change. He praised X, saying that “too much harmless content gets censored,” and shared his belief that the changes would pave the way for “freedom of expression.”

“We have seen this approach work in X, where the community is empowered to decide when a post is potentially misleading and requires more context. “People with different perspectives decide what context is useful to others,” Kaplan wrote. “We think this may be a better and less biased way to achieve our original goal of providing information about what people are seeing. ”

Despite calling himself a “free speech absolutist,” Elon Musk has accused X of censorship, especially after X suspended several prominent journalists last year. It’s been criticized. Just this week, X suspended a journalist who debunked the theory that Elon Musk’s fan account was his own, and went so far as to block her from linking to her article.

Mehta did not say where in Texas the company plans to move its trust and safety team. When X announced similar changes last year, it said it would hire a team of 100 full-time staff in Austin tasked with enforcing content and safety rules. The capital has previously attracted the attention of tech companies looking for change, after Apple last year told a team of more than 100 California employees to move to Austin or lose their jobs.

Regarding the Meta version of the community notes program, contributing users write and rate added context, not Meta itself. The move to Community Notes comes as Meta takes a more personalized approach to political content and allows those who want to see more political content in their feed to see it. This is a complete 180-degree move considering Meta is notorious for restricting content related to elections and social issues.

Another change Facebook and Instagram users can expect is the lifting of restrictions on certain topics like immigration and gender identity. Mehta said it could take several weeks for the policy changes to be fully implemented.

The change in Meta’s approach to content moderation comes less than two weeks before Inauguration Day. Zuckerberg said in his announcement that the recent election felt like a “cultural tipping point to once again prioritize speech.”

“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world who seek to go after American companies and increase censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

It’s unclear where in Texas Meta wants to settle its trust and safety team, but Austin has a history of attracting technology talent. Meta had previously planned to grow in Austin, but recently gave up its lease in the city and ultimately lost it to IBM.

Meta’s efforts to imitate X come on the heels of an exodus of users in November, dissatisfied with the way X moderated its content and outcry over Musk’s ties to President-elect Donald Trump. Rival social media company BlueSky has gained millions of new users, but its growth appears to be slowing.