The spirit of Facebook is moving from California to Texas

Corporations are reactionary creatures. It’s true that some CEOs are industry leaders who revolutionize the world, but most of them are gatekeepers, stewards who read cultural tea leaves and adjust their businesses accordingly. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, may have once been a maverick. Now he’s a steward, trying to keep his head above water as the culture changes around him.

In that spirit, he announced on Tuesday that the trust and safety teams that write content policy for Facebook, Meta and Threads will move from California to Texas. Facebook’s content cops will trade In & Out for Whataburger.

The announcement was part of a major media blitz Tuesday morning. To hear Zuckerberg tell it, the company is looking to its past to shape its future. Looking to “come back” if you will. “It’s time to get back to our roots about free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted on blog post, Facebook, Instagramand summarized in Threads.

To hear Zuckerberg tell it, the past four years have been a government censorship nightmare, and it’s time to stop. To that end, the social media company is replacing fact-checking with an X-style community notes system, simplifying its content policies, changing how it enforces those policies, removing restrictions on political content, and moving moderation teams from California to Texas .

The content moderation changes are part of a broader shift by Meta, an attempt to signal to a changing America that it’s keeping up with the times. Facebook and Instagram have been in decline for years. Sure, they have billions of users, but the feed is full of AI slop. Jesus Shrimp and unreal limbless veterans seek reactions on our Facebook feeds. AI profiles for people who don’t exist tell stories about lives that are not real. Instagram will stole your face and places you in an endless hall of mirrors, using your own image to advertise you.

But don’t worry about those perverse incentives that created an era of AI sloppiness. Don’t worry about system issues with a rotting platform. You see, comedy will soon be legal again on Facebook. For the past dozen years, Facebook and Instagram’s moderation policies have been an aggressive and mysterious black box. If you’ve posted the wrong thing, you’ll end up in Facebook Jail or Take Abuse.

What was and wasn’t off limits wasn’t clear and often felt arbitrary. I’ve watched friends report meme pages that do nothing but recycle Holocaust content from 4chan, only to see nothing happen. They would then post a screenshot from a horror movie and get a 30 day ban. One of the biggest problems with Facebook moderation wasn’t so much that it was draconian and ideological, but that it was opaque. You never know what the rules are.

We won’t know what the rules are yet, but we can be sure they’ll be more “Texas” and less “California.”

Zuckerberg didn’t mince words, blaming the media’s reaction to the 2016 election. about Meta’s era of censorship. People basically lost their minds after Trump’s first election. Many of them specifically blamed Facebook.

“We have tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of the truth.” But fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more truth than they’ve created, especially in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “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. What began as a movement for greater inclusion has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and people with different ideas. And it went too far.”

The meta has signaled in other ways in recent days that it is shifting with the political headwinds. He was appointed on Monday three new members to the board of directors, including UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime ally of President-elect Donald Trump. Last week, Meta kicked out Nick Clegg as its head of global policy and replaced him with Joel Kaplan.

Kaplan is a Republican and former adviser to George W. Bush. Kaplan, less than a week on the job, appeared on Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning to pitch Zuckerberg’s new policy to Facebook’s older user base.

Like Zuckerberg, Kaplan wanted the world to know that Facebook was once again a platform for free speech, that the world had changed, and that it was time for people to post freely without fear of censorship.

“If you can say it on TV. If you can say it on the floor of Congress. You should certainly be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said.

Both Zuckerberg and Kaplan were clear that this is all happening because of Trump. “There is no doubt that there has been a change in the last four years. We’ve seen a lot of public and political pressure toward more content moderation, more censorship,” Kaplan said. “And now we have a real opportunity. We have a new administration with a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression. And that matters.”

So Zuckerberg is moving his content moderators from California to Texas. It may seem like a big change, but the states are remarkably similar to anyone who has lived in both. Both have huge technology hubs that have shaped the way business is done in the country and the world. Both are dominated by massive urban centers surrounded by sprawling suburbs and extensive agricultural infrastructure. Both are places where money – not politicians, not really – has the final say.

The Meta team is trading one air-conditioned land of freeways and shopping malls for another and promising a massive cultural shift. I have no doubt that you will be able to post more racist and harsh memes on Facebook in the future without getting in trouble. But it won’t slow down the AI ​​scum. It won’t make the site a better purveyor of truth or a bastion of free speech.

But hey, at least comedy will be legal on Facebook again. And that’s something. right