Meta moderators were already in Texas before Zuckerberg announced move, say ex-workers

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.”

Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas told the Guardian the same. One said many people across Meta’s various divisions did trust and safety work in the company’s Austin offices. Another said that many content moderators, including those allocated to the trust and safety teams, have been in Austin for a long time. All were granted anonymity for fear of professional reprisal.

“They’ve always had people there,” one former employee in the trust and safety division said. “They may be moving more people there, but positioning it as though they’re doing something new to address liberal California bias is laughable at best.”

The relocation of teams to Texas and the end of factchecking are clear signals that Zuckerberg has undergone an about-face transformation from his 2016 mission to tackle misinformation. He has made several moves to appeal to the incoming president, who had previously lambasted Zuckerberg for election interference and threatened him with “life in prison”. Zuckerberg reportedly met with Trump the day before his announcement and spent Friday evening at Mar-a-Lago.

Willner said Meta’s halt to factchecking, along with other major changes at the company, won’t be the end of the social media platform’s “really wild swings”.

“To me, what this inaugurates is an era of a lot of twisting in the wind,” Willner said. “I think we’re going to see this rush in one direction and we’re going to see a rush back in another direction.”

Meta has several offices in Texas, mostly clustered in Austin – a progressive city in the conservative state. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It did not answer questions about how many employees will be affected and if trust and safety teams are moving to Texas or simply “out of California”. Meta also didn’t respond to questions about whether the affected workers are full-time employees or contractors.

One former employee told the Guardian that Meta has been “cutting corners” on trust and safety for a while. While the company had full-time employees working on those issues in Austin for years, the former employee said that, more recently, it began outsourcing more content moderator work to contractors. Meta has long employed contractors as content moderators in Texas. One of the third-party companies it works closely with, Accenture, has several major offices there.

Thousands of full-time employees work for Meta in Texas in several different departments. More than 220 workers were laid off in the state in 2022, however, as part of a large restructuring of the social media company. In all, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees worldwide with Zuckerberg deeming it the “year of efficiency”. Meta’s trust and safety teams were some of the hardest hit.