With just under two weeks left until former president Donald Trump becomes President Donald Trump, Meta has announced that the company will be fully moving its trust and safety teams—the people responsible for enforcing policies around hate speech and disinformation—to Texas. (It will also be rolling back its fact checking program.) The decision, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Threads, “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”

Zuckerberg didn’t explain why people who live in Texas would be less prone to bias than those who live in California, but that was perhaps besides the point. This was just the latest in a series of moves—including elevating former Republican operative Joel Kaplan to chief global affairs officer and adding combat-sports promoter Dana White to Meta’s board—that seem to indicate the company is vying to get into the good graces of the new administration. In response, President-elect Trump praised the announcement. “Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way—Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said, noting that the change was “probably” made in response to his threats against Zuckerberg.

But the move to Texas may have more advantages than just political posturing. Texas is one of two states—the other is Florida—with a law essentially forbidding moderation of a great deal of content on social media platforms. It also has a regulatory system that’s exceptionally friendly to companies. And, as usual, X owner and centibillionaire Elon Musk has led the way.

In September, Musk officially moved X’s headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, where his other companies, Starlink and the Boring Company, are also based. At the time, Musk cited California’s gender identity law as the reason for the move. (Meta’s new policy changes now appear to allow users to assert that gay and trans people have mental illnesses.)

“They’re obviously following Elon Musk’s lead,” says Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech. “Just by the signal [sent by] moving their base of operations from what is perceived to be a liberally-biased state—it’s not—to what’s perceived to be a Republican or conservative-coded state.”

In 2021, following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the state passed a law that banned social media companies from removing or moderating content based on the user’s political views. State officials could then mandate that platforms keep certain content up in the name of free speech.

Lawsuits challenging the legislation and Florida’s similar law made it to the Supreme Court in 2024, in Moody v. Netchoice. The case has since been returned back to the lower courts, where an appellate court previously ruled that social media companies don’t have the right to censor speech under the First Amendment. But Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the free speech nonprofit Free Press, says that this environment could be favorable for companies as they roll back content moderation, and could form the legal basis of a challenge similar to Netchoice.

“Executives are doing everything they can to create an environment conducive for actions they want to take, absent review or accountability from actors like our courts or legislators or others,” she says.

Since taking over X, formerly Twitter, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important allies, backing his campaign financially and lending the full weight of his own platform to promoting Trump’s talking points during the campaign. He has since sat in on meetings with foreign leaders with the president-elect, and weighed in on staffing choices for the new administration. Other tech leaders have taken note, cozying up to Trump and donating to his inauguration fund. But even before the election, other tech companies were following X’s lead in rolling back policies and protections that had previously been in place.

For his part, David Greene, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Meta and other social platforms would likely have to comply with state laws regardless of location. And relocating staff to Texas doesn’t mean all its supposed moderation problems will be fixed. Bias, he says, can cut both ways.

“Misinformation is really one of many, many, many issues that social media platforms have to deal with,” he says. “Having a moderation team in Texas might raise concerns about bias as well. 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 is doing significant business in a state, that allows them to use that state for jurisdiction in whatever future filings they have,” she says.

In 2023, X filed a lawsuit in Texas against the nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America, alleging that the group had disparaged the company by pointing out that hate speech and disinformation on the platform ran next to ads. At the time, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton also announced his office was opening an investigation into the organization. A federal judge in Texas refused to throw out the case in August 2024. X has since changed its terms of service so that any lawsuits against the company must be brought in Texas. Federal ones must be brought in the Northern District of Texas, widely viewed as friendly to Musk’s interests. (The judge in the Media Matters case, for example, reportedly bought and sold stock in Musk’s Tesla company earlier in the year, before the suit was brought.)

Meta’s terms of service, unlike its community guidelines, so far remain the same, mandating disputes be settled either in the Northern District of California or, at the state level, in San Mateo County. But that could change.

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

Gill posits that the regulatory environment in Texas may resemble what companies believe the national regulatory environment will come to look like under a new Trump administration.

“I think that they are looking ahead and seeing an environment that is going to be dominated by a conservative-leaning and kind of extremist administration,” she says. “So they are moving to places where that’s the norm so they can pre-comply.”

Gill also notes that Meta is facing an antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission, which a friendly administration could see fit to toss. “By pre-emptively making these changes that they hope will appease the administration, they may be hoping for a friendly decision in return,” she says.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.