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

“Executives do everything they can to create a favorable environment for the actions they want to take, absent review or accountability from actors such as our courts or legislators or others,” he says.

After taking X, before Twitter, Musk became one of the most important allies of Trump, support his campaign financially and lending the full weight of his own platform to promote Trump’s talking points during the campaign. Since then, he has sat in on meetings with foreign leaders with the president-elect, and weighed in staffing choices for the new administration. Other tech leaders have taken note, welcoming Trump and donation to his inauguration fund. But even before the election, other tech companies have followed X’s lead in rolling back policies and protections who had been in the place.

For his part, David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that 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 their supposed moderation problems will be solved. Prejudice, 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 the publication of certain information about the availability of abortion services illegal.”

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

In 2023, X filed a lawsuit in Texas against the non-profit watchdog Media Matters for Americaclaiming that the group had despised the company indicating that hate speech and misinformation on the platform ran alongside the ads. At the time, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced his office opened an investigation into the organization. A federal judge in Texas refused to dismiss the case in August 2024. X has since has changed its terms of service so that any suit against the company must be brought in Texas. The feds should be brought to the Northern District of Texas, widely seen as friendly to Musk’s interests. (The judge in the Media Matters case, for example, said bought and sold stock at Musk’s Tesla company earlier in the year, before the suit was filed.)

of Meta terms of servicecontrary to its community guidelines, so far they remain the same, disputes sent to be resolved in the Northern District of California or, at the state level, in the County of San Mateo. But that could change.

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

Gill postulates that the regulatory environment in Texas may resemble what companies believe the national regulatory environment will be like under a new Trump administration.

“I think they’re looking ahead and they see an environment that’s going to be dominated by a conservative administration and kind of an extremist administration,” he says. “So they move to places where it’s the norm so they can pre-comply.”

Gill also notes that Meta is facing a antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commissionwhich a friendly administration might see fit to dispose of. “By preemptively making these changes that they hope will appease the administration, they can hope for a friendly decision in return,” he says.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.