Meta is following Elon Musk’s lead, moving its employees to billionaire-friendly Texas

“Executives do everything they can to create an enabling environment for actions they want to take without review or accountability from actors like our courts or legislators or others,” she says.

Since taking over X, formerly Twitter, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important allies. financially support his campaign and giving full weight to his own platform to promote Trump’s talking points during the campaign. Since then, he has attended meetings with foreign leaders with the president-elect and provided input personnel selection for the new administration. Other tech leaders have taken notice, approaching Trump and donates to his inauguration fund. But even before the election, other tech companies followed X’s lead in rolling back policies and protections which were in place before.

For his part, David Green, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Meta and other social platforms will likely have to comply with state laws regardless of location. And moving the staff to Texas doesn’t mean all of its alleged moderation problems will be fixed. Addiction, he says, can cut both ways.

“Misinformation is really one of the many, many, many problems that social media platforms have to deal with,” he says. “Having a moderation team in Texas could also raise concerns about bias. For example, Texas has laws on the books that make it illegal to publish certain information about the availability of abortion services.

But Benavidez says Texas’ social media law may not be the state’s only call. “Once a company is headquartered or doing significant business in a state, that allows them to use that state for jurisdiction in whatever future filings they have,” she says.

In 2023 X filed a lawsuit in Texas against the nonprofit Media Matters for Americaclaiming that the group disrespected the company by pointing out that hate speech and misinformation on the platform go as far as ads. At the time, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced his office launched an investigation into the organization. Federal judge in Texas declined to dismiss the case in August 2024. X has been ever since change your terms of service so any lawsuits against the company must be filed in Texas. The feds are to be brought into the Northern District of Texas, widely seen as friendly to Musk’s interests. (For example, the Media Matters judge reportedly shares bought and sold at Musk’s Tesla company earlier in the year, before the lawsuit was filed.)

of Meta terms of serviceunlike the community guidelines, remain the same for now, mandating that disputes be resolved either in the Northern District of California or at the state level in San Mateo County. But that could change.

“The legislative environment, the judicial environment, the gubernatorial environment in Texas is incredibly conducive to executives like Musk and now Zuckerberg,” Benavidez says.

Gill argued that the regulatory environment in Texas could resemble what companies believe the national regulatory environment will look like under the new Trump administration.

“I think they’re looking ahead and seeing an environment that’s going to be dominated by a conservative and extremist administration,” she says. “So they’re moving to places where that’s the norm so they can comply beforehand.”

Gill also notes that Meta is facing antitrust suit by the Federal Trade Commissionwhich a friendly administration might see fit to throw. “By preemptively making these changes that they hope will appease the administration, they may be hoping for an amicable resolution in return,” she says.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.