“Executives are doing everything they can to create an environment conducive to the actions they want to take, without review or accountability by actors like our courts, legislators or others,” he says.
Since taking over X, formerly Twitter, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important allies. financially support your campaign and lend the full weight of his own platform to promote Trump’s talking points during the campaign. Since then he has attended meetings with foreign leaders with the president-elect and has intervened in personnel options for the new administration. Other tech leaders have taken note and reached out to Trump and donating to their inauguration fund. But even before the election, other tech companies were following X’s lead by rolling back policies and protections that had previously been in place.
For his part, David Greene, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Meta and other social platforms would likely have to comply with state laws regardless of their location. And relocating staff to Texas doesn’t mean all of their alleged moderation issues will be fixed. Bias, 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 that make it illegal to publish certain information about the availability of abortion services.”
But Benavidez says Texas’ social media law may not be the state’s only appeal. “Once a company is headquartered or conducts significant business in a state, that allows it to use that state as a jurisdiction in any future filings it has,” he says.
In 2023, . 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 dismiss the case in August 2024. X has since changed their terms of service so any lawsuit against the company must be filed in Texas. The feds must be deployed in the Northern District of Texas, widely considered friendly to Musk’s interests. (The judge in the Media Matters case, for example, supposedly shares bought and sold at Musk’s Tesla company earlier this year, before the lawsuit was filed).
goal terms of serviceUnlike their community guidelines, they remain the same so far, calling for disputes to be resolved 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 and the governing environment in Texas are incredibly favorable for executives like Musk and now Zuckerberg,” Benavidez says.
Gill posits that the regulatory environment in Texas may resemble what companies believe the national regulatory environment will be under a new Trump administration.
“I think they’re looking to the future and seeing an environment that will be dominated by a conservative-leaning, somewhat extremist administration,” he says. “So they’re moving to places where that’s the norm so they can be pre-compliant.”
Gill also notes that Meta faces a Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuitthat a friendly administration might see fit to discard. “By preemptively making these changes that they hope will appease the administration, they may be hoping for an amicable decision in return,” he says.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.