Facebook, Threads and Instagram: A Political Tipping Point for Content Hosts: Mark Zuckerberg and the Move from California to Texas
There was an indication that there is a piece to the changes from the fact that Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams are moving from California to Texas. He said the geographical move was political, and it would help to build trust in places that don’t have much concern about the biases of the teams. Hello, Mark? Meta has their content arbiters in a location with a possibly different bias. California may be a less risky place to work than deep-red Texas is to them.
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 was based on what right-wing politicians and pundits had said for years. The new political regime felt like a cultural tipping point, according to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who made the comments in a video.
In August, when he sent a letter to Jim Jordan, telling him that the Biden administration wanted Meta to “censor” some Covid-19 content, he indicated he might be OK with the term. (The content remained, which actually illustrates that Facebook is granted the power to shape free expression in the US, not the government.) He used the term as a synonym for the whole practice of content moderation in his post. He said that they would reduce the amount of censorship on their platforms. An alternate reading might be—we’re letting the dobermans out!
The main motivator for the change is the desire to boost freedom of expression. Meta’s social networks had become too extreme in restricting the speech of users, he said, so the thrust of the changes—which included ending Meta’s multiyear partnerships with third-party fact-checking organizations and retreating from efforts to diminish the spread of hate speech—is to let freedom ring, even if it means “we’re gonna catch less bad stuff.”
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.”
Creating Trust in Social Media: Losing Bias and Implications for the Free Expression of Political and Behavioral Viewpoints on Fact-checked Content
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.
“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 across the globe, Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation related to those votes.
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 their trust and safety team from California to Texas, in order to remove bias. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
Texas may have more advantages than just political posturing. Texas and Florida have laws that forbid moderation of content on social media platforms. It also has a regulatory system that’s exceptionally friendly to companies. And, as usual, X owner and centibillionaire Elon Musk has led the way.
Nicole Gill is the executive director of Accountable Tech. They moved their base of operations to what is perceived to be a conservative state because of the signal that was sent.
Lawsuits challenging the legislation and Florida’s similar law made it to the Supreme Court in 2024, in Moody v. Netchoice. The case was returned to the lower courts after the appeals court ruled that social media companies don’t have the right to censor speech. The Free Press believes that the environment could be favorable for companies as they roll back content moderation, and can become the basis for a challenge similar to Netchoice.