Zuckerberg Says He’s Fixing Political Bias… by Forcing Content Moderators to Move to State with Abortion Ban

Mark Zuckerberg, once a vocal critic of former President Trump, continues his disturbing pivot to enable if not altogether embrace the far-right president-elect. On Tuesday, the Meta CEO wrote off the company’s fact-checking program employed to moderate Facebook posts as “politically biased,” and announced that the program would be replaced with community notes similar to the model at Elon Musk’s Twitter/X. 

There is… a lot to unpack with this—for starters, contrary to Zuckerberg’s suggestion that fact-checkers impede free speech, fact-checking is actually vital speech in itself. But all of this gets even worse: Zuckerberg also announced that Meta’s safety and content moderators will be required to move from California to Texas. “This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” he wrote on Threads, shamelessly conceding to right-wing narratives and propaganda that portray California as a dystopian, far-left society.

In effect, Zuckerberg is claiming to weed out political bias—by forcing employees to move to a state with a total ban on abortion, where there are at least three confirmed cases of women dying from these laws. Texas also bans gender-affirming health care. It’s hard to think of anything more “politically biased” than being forced by your employer to live in a state that accords more rights to fetuses than pregnant people. 

When the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade in 2022, Meta joined Disney and a handful of other corporations in offering to cover some costs of abortion-related travel. (Of course, no one should have to tell their employer they need an abortion, nor should someone’s access to the health service be tied to their full-time employment at a large corporation.) 

Still, long before Zuckerberg forced employees to risk their lives and move to an abortion-banned state, Meta has done a whole lot more harm than good on the issue: At the same time that the company made a very public display of offering to help employees access abortion in 2022, internal policy prohibited employees from talking to each other about abortion rights. Organizations that offer medically accurate information about medication abortion and how to legally buy it online have long reported that their posts and accounts have repeatedly been taken down, penalized, or even suspended by Meta—all at a time when this information is increasingly vital.

Speaking of free speech issues, incidentally, at the same time that Zuckerberg is claiming to promote free speech and eradicate liberal bias, Meta is reportedly deleting employees’ internal comments that are critical of the company for appointing UFC CEO Dana White—a Trump surrogate who hit his wife on video—to its board.

In any case, Zuckerberg’s mandate to relocate content moderators makes no sense in more ways than one. It’s not just his appraisal of Texas as a haven free of “political bias”—his read of California as a socialist commune makes just as little sense if not less. The state arguably leads the nation in policies that dehumanize homeless people, while the Silicon Valley tech bubble that Zuckerberg himself helped create is continuously pioneering new ways to surveil and undermine our civil liberties. But, as Zuckerberg sees it, the fact that some Californians hang rainbow flags on their porches means he now has to relocate his employees to a state that effectively bans hospitals from saving pregnant women's lives.

At the end of the day, Zuckerberg isn’t trying to make sense—he’s trying to make nice with the incoming Trump administration. In December, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s transition team. Zuckerberg personally met with Trump shortly after he won the election. 

There's never been reason to believe Zuckerberg is a particularly good person, nor Meta née Facebook a particularly ethical corporation. Unfettered political disinformation on Facebook helped elect Trump in 2016, all on top of helping to promote the Myanmar genocide. And, today, Zuckerberg’s eye roll-inducing talking points about promoting free speech and eradicating liberal bias rely on the distinctly Trumpian, right-wing framing of “neutrality” and “objectivity” solely as conservatism.