Mark Zuckerberg Is Moving Moderators to Texas, but Is He also Switching States?
The Meta CEO is moving his team, but there's been no indication that he's moving his own family.
Published Jan. 8 2025, 2:23 p.m. ET
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made some pretty major announcements about the company's approach to fact-checking moving forward. Meta is apparently going to make a number of changes, including moving away from content moderation in favor of the community notes model that Twitter currently employs.
Among the changes that he made, though, was the news that he would be moving Meta's content moderation team to Texas from California. Following the news, many wanted to know whether Mark would also be switching states. Here's what we know.
Is Mark Zuckerberg moving to Texas?
In announcing the changes to Meta's approach to fact-checking, Mark made this statement:
“We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Mark did not say anything about leaving California himself, although there has been a wave of people leaving California for Texas in part because of real estate costs. That's especially true in the world of tech, where Elon Musk has apparently decided that Texas should be home. For now, though, it seems that Mark has not decided to make that life change, and is instead just moving part of his company there.
Notably, Mark seems to have made the move because he has bought into right-wing criticisms that people in California simply can't moderate content fairly. In Texas, though, people are much more likely to be fair, or at least if his team is in Texas, the right-wing critique will carry less weight.
Essentially, though, the move is a total capitulation to the incoming Trump administration, which has made pretty explicit threats against Meta.
The tech world is moving toward the MAGA movement.
On top of Elon Musk's total buy-in to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, Mark's recent announcement suggests that he and the team at Meta are preparing to live in a world where MAGA is the dominant American ideology.
That isn't to say, of course, that Meta's previous approach to content moderation was working great.
What seems clear, though, is that the changes Mark is making to his platforms are designed to make them spaces that are friendlier to people on the right. Only time will tell exactly how these changes will impact the content available on their platforms, and what that might mean about who they cater to and who decides to leave them.
The initial announcement about Meta's changes was enough to convince some people to move off of the platforms that Meta owns, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. While the company will still maintain a massive user base, it'll take some time to understand what seeing more political content on those sites will mean for their users and for the platforms themselves.