Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a carefully worded statement that Meta's trust and safety and content management teams would be relocated from California and that the company's content review would be “based in Texas.” The goal of these team efforts is to prevent users of Facebook and Instagram from encountering hate speech, pornography, and violent content.
The CEO said moving moderators to the Lone Star State “helps address concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content.” it was part of bigger announcement Meta says it is ending its fact-checking program, relaxing content restrictions and focusing on “freedom of expression.” Moderators are separate from the meta fact-checking efforts conducted by third parties.
But former Facebook employees say the announcement of a move to Texas rings hollow. That's because Meta already operates large-scale content management and trust/safety operations in the state. They claim the move is nothing but a blatant appeal to Donald Trump. facebook Former Content Standards Manager He said he helped start those teams in Texas more than 10 years ago.
“They made quite a noise saying, 'Oh, we're worried about bias, we're going to move all our content management teams elsewhere,'” Dave Wilner said during a Lawfare panel last week. He spoke at “As far as I understand, it's mostly fake.”
Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the Texas trust and safety team told the Guardian the same thing. Many people from various departments at Meta worked in trust and safety work at the company's Austin office, one person said. Another official said many content moderators have been in Austin for a long time, including those assigned to the trust and safety teams. All were given anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.
“They always had people,” said one former trust and safety employee. “They may be trying to move more people there, but positioning them as if they're doing something new to address liberal California bias is ludicrous at best.”
The team's move to Texas and the end of fact-checking are clear signs that Zuckerberg has pivoted from his 2016 mission. Dealing with misinformation. He has made several moves to appeal to the president-elect, who previously accused Zuckerberg of election interference. threatened him In “life sentence”. zuckerberg He reportedly met with Trump. I spent Friday night at Mar-a-Lago the day before his announcement.
Willner said Meta's fact-checking suspension and the company's other major changes do not end the social media platform's “really wild swings.”
“To me, I think this is the beginning of an era of big swings in the wind,” Willner said. “I think we're going to see this rush in one direction, and then we're going to see another rush back in another direction.”
Meta has several offices in Texas, mostly in Austin, a progressive city in a conservative state. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The company did not answer questions about how many employees would be affected or whether the trust and safety team would be relocated to Texas or simply “outside of California.” Meta also did not respond to questions about whether the affected employees were full-time employees or contractors.
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One former employee told the Guardian that Meta had been “cutting corners” when it came to trust and safety for some time. For years, the company had a full-time employee working on these issues in Austin, but recently began outsourcing content moderation jobs to contractors, former employees said. meta is long Hire contractors as content moderators In Texas. Accenture, one of the third-party companies we work closely with, has main office There.
At Meta, Texas, we have thousands of full-time employees working in various departments. More than 220 workers were laid off However, it is expected to be established in the state in 2022 as part of a major restructuring of the social media company. Overall, the meta fired the following numbers 11,000 employees worldwide Zuckerberg sees this year as the “year of efficiency.” Meta's Trust and Safety team was part of that. suffered the greatest blow.
