Meta moving trust and safety teams to Texas from California
Social media giant Meta announced Tuesday that they would move their content reviewers and policy writers from California to Texas.
What We Know: The move from Meta comes as it announced it would end its independent fact-checking program and move to a community notes-style system like social media platform X.
Meta said in a blog post that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, "has gone too far."
Meta had been using independent third-parties for fact checking but said the program is ending because the experts had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
What We Don't Know: Meta did not reveal where the team would be located when they make the move to Texas.
The company has an office in Austin, but did not say whether the team would be based there.
The company's career page lists several open positions on the communications and public policy team that are listed as based in Austin.
Big Picture View: Meta said it was restricting millions of pieces of content on their platforms daily and the change would be an effort to roll back "mission creep" that they felt made things too restrictive and prone to over-enforcement.
The move towards a community notes-style of moderation is a "better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they're seeing - and one that's less prone to bias," the company said.
The company is also rolling back restrictions on some political speech that would have been flagged previously.
They said the content would be treated more like any other content from people and pages a user follows and start ranking based on signals from the user such as liking a post.
What's Next: Meta is currently allowing people to sign up to be among the first community notes members for Facebook, Threads and Instagram.
The company said they will begin transitioning to community notes in the United States in the next couple of months and will continue to improve the system over the course of the year.