from the a-bit-o-fact-checking dept
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly appears to be just a flat out lie.
As you may recall, as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking, enable more hatred, and just generally suck up to the Trump administration, there was the weird promise that because California content moderation and trust & safety teams were too “biased,” they would be moved to Texas.
Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased. Or something.
This was stupid at the time, and in practice, it appears to be absolute garbage. As many people (including us on Ctrl-Alt-Speech) pointed out, Meta already has a large trust & safety team in Texas.
So many of the people were already in Texas. What about the folks in California who were told they’d have to move? According to Wired, most have been told the mandate doesn’t actually apply to them.
So it sure sounds like the big announcement of how content moderation and trust & safety were moving to Texas was a load of garbage. Many of those people are already there.
The whole thing, as expected, was about making a fake public concession to Donald Trump in an attempt to curry political favor.
While Zuckerberg’s motivations here seem transparently political, the broader implications remain concerning. It’s especially worrying given how a ton of people are going around falsely claiming Zuckerberg caved to pressure from Biden, while everyone seems to be ignoring the much more blatant act of him actually caving to Trump.
Moving critical trust & safety functions to appease partisan interests sets a troubling precedent. It’s a short-sighted move that prioritizes political expediency over principled policymaking. But that’s the world Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to embrace.
Companies: meta
