When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that the company was relocating its content moderation and trust and safety teams from California to Texas to “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” it sounded like a major operational shift. But according to several former Meta employees, the proclamation rings hollow – because those teams have been based in Texas for years.
“They made a lot of hay of: ‘Oh, we’re worried about bias, we’re moving all these content moderation teams to other places,'” said Dave Willner, Facebook’s former head of content standards, during a recent panel. “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, that is mostly fake.”
The Texas Teams That Already Were
Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas confirmed to the Guardian that Meta has had major content moderation operations in the Lone Star State for over a decade. One noted that many people across various Meta divisions did trust and safety work out of the company’s Austin offices.
“They’ve always had people there,” a former trust and safety employee 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.”
An About-Face to Please the President?
Zuckerberg’s announcement, which also revealed Meta is ending its factchecking program, represents a stark reversal from his 2016 push to combat misinformation. Many see it as a blatant attempt to cozy up to incoming president Donald Trump, who previously accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened him with “life in prison.”
The day before declaring the teams’ relocation and factchecking cuts, Zuckerberg reportedly met with Trump. He was then spotted at Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening. The rapid-fire moves suggest the Facebook founder is twisting himself into knots to appease the soon-to-be commander-in-chief.
Contracting Out Content Review
While Meta has employed full-time trust and safety staff in Texas for years, one former worker said the company more recently began outsourcing more of its content moderation to contractors, like Accenture, which has several offices in the state. Meta has long relied on contract labor for the psychologically taxing work of screening posts for violent, hateful and pornographic content.
“To me, what this inaugurates is an era of a lot of twisting in the wind,” Willner predicted. “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 laid off more than 11,000 workers worldwide last year in a major restructuring Zuckerberg dubbed “the year of efficiency,” with trust and safety teams among the hardest hit. Over 220 employees were cut from the Austin office alone.
So while Zuckerberg’s Texas “move” makes for an attractive talking point to curry favor with the incoming administration, the reality, according to those who would know, is that it’s much ado about nothing. The content moderation army was already deep in the heart of Texas – they’re just wearing new hats now in the social media giant’s latest political pivot.
