Zuckerberg's plan to move Meta employees to Texas isn't just toadying

As part of the larger billionaire rush to kiss Donald Trump's criminal ass, Facebook weirdo Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a massive restructuring of the company into something more overtly right-wing and creepy.

More creepy than current Facebook, where engagement bots, scammers, and Meta-created A.I. accounts all compete for your attention as the company tries to squeeze every last bit of "monetization" out of you it can? Yep. So if you haven't abandoned the platform yet, you might want to consider it.

We'll have to go to Bluesky for the link, in our usual attempts to limit our direct exposure to radioactive evil. But the short version is that Zuckerberg just announced he intends to copy Elon Musk's "X" policies nearly note-for-note, doing away with fact checking in favor of non-objective "Community Notes," nixing anti-harassment policies to allow more pointed insults aimed at trans and , and all the rest. After throttling "civic content," aka news and political content, for the whole of the Biden administration, now that Trump's back in charge he'll be flipping that switch back on too; go figure.

Yup. Meta now intends to become a clone of X, and only a short year or two after Zuckerberg launched "Threads," an effort to capitalize on the droves of consumers fleeing X after being exposed to worsening daily streams of racism, abuse, and open Naziism. Smooth move there, buddy. (It should be noted that Threads has largely failed to attract such traffic, in large part because Meta saddled it with algorithms that try their damnedest to make sure you never see any of the things you're actually interested in. It's the latest evidence that Zuckerberg has cleansed his company of anyone who might have even the smallest idea of what customers actually "want," as opposed to what Meta can force them into.)

On Monday, Zuckerberg also appointed Trump ally Dana White to Meta's board; he's also shelling out $1 million to help fund The Criminal's inauguration.

That's a lot of toadying. At one point Zuckerberg might have been embarrassed by this attempt to become an Elon Musk clone, given the rivalry there, but no longer. And if you're wondering why the man appears to be making the long trek to Trump's duodenum, now that it's clear The Criminal will be headed to the White House instead of to prison, the answer is "it's a straight up bribe." Nobody's even trying too hard to hide it.

Meta is currently facing an enormous antitrust action from the Federal Trade Commission, and it's a near-certainty that one of the Trump crew's first acts will be to kill that antitrust suit outright. So long as Zuckerberg keeps doing Trump favors, of course; nothing happens for free. Meta's going to have to keep toadying from here on in.

This one part of Musk's announcement is especially interesting, though.

5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Okay, well, that statement is so singularly stupid that now I want to double-boycott every Meta product. Yikes, is that one insulting, gutless lie he slopped out there.

So apparently, people in California are "biased," and people in Texas ... aren't, huh? Oh, I'd absolutely love this goofball to explain that one at length. I want to hear "Zuck" explain in great detail why Texas, the state that keeps horking up public figures like Ken Paxton and Louie Gohmert, is the most neutralist and unbiased of them all. Not California! Not Iowa! Not Michigan! Not one of them Carolinas, no sir! It's gotta be Texas!

Of course, this is definitely not an attempt by "Zuck" to hide his company behind the most right-wing, pro-corporate, anti-consumer courts in the nation. Nor is it a Musklike move to dodge California labor laws that make it slightly more difficult than billionaires think it ought to be to kill off employees outright. No, no, it's the bias thing. People in Texas are less "biased."

That Texas now happens to have morphed into a virulently anti-abortion state in which pregnancy is becoming more and more dangerous as doctors delay lifesaving treatments during miscarriages and other complications so that they be prosecuted by state officials for "aiding abortion," however, is conspicuous.

That's an aspect of this that I haven't heard many people mention: moving your company to Texas in 2024 and 2025 is a pretty brazenly misogynistic move, in that you're demanding the women of your company move to a state in which their lives will be put at greater risk in comparison to the company's men. Many women aren't going to want to make that move, because dying in a Texas hospital so that Mark Zuckerberg can suck up to a sedition-backing criminal freak is, despite what "Zuck" might imagine, not high on anyone's priority list but his own.

Just to add some color commentary to this, I'll also add that Mark Zuckerberg has allegedly been undergoing something of a personality change of late, though how much of it is performative and how much of it is real is debatable. The effort is publicly seen as an attempt to boost his perceived masculinity, which is definitely a real thing that rich assholes with more money than most countries spend their days obsessing about because eff us all, that's why.

Similarly, Trump buddy Dana White, the newest Meta board member, is the UFC chief executive who was caught on video slapping his wife during a party, if you're wondering what possible qualification this particular Trump hanger-on brings to running a social media company.

Now, at the moment it's still unclear what "moving to Texas" really means. There's no way Meta is going to pay its bottom-rung, barely-minimum-wage and heftily abused moderation employees to move to Texas, so if moving those "content review" teams to Texas is what Zuckerberg means by this then what he's really saying is "we're going to fire all our California employees and rehire in Texas."

On the other hand, if it's the management teams for those departments that are being moved out of California, then it's highly probable that a lot of women in those departments are going to resign rather than abide living in the Handmaid State. Many of those women will resign; a similar proportion of men probably won't.

So that'll be an interesting change in corporate culture, right there. Moving to one of the most anti-abortion, pro-maternity-death states in the nation is a reasonably predictable way to turn your company's management more male and more "conservative" overnight, if that's the sort of thing you're into.

Now, you're going to have to forgive me for all this rampant speculation. I'm tired, I'm still in my post-Covid brain funk, and I've been freakin' through some things, in the last year; things like this are almost always near the top of my mind of late. But if you're running a California company and you want to "restructure" things so as to get rid of a hell of a lot of employees so that they can be replaced with cheaper replacements, you're fairly constrained in how you can go about it.

One of the most effective corporate approaches, though, is well-known by managers everywhere: you crank up the employee harassment and abuse, little by little, until the employees you want to replace all get so fed up they resign en masse. You make it outright unpleasant or even medically dangerous to work there, so that employees flee. Then you're free to hire your preferred, cheaper replacements, no questions asked.

If Meta's management wanted to "restructure" certain departments to be more overtly pro-Trump, conservative, and male-dominated, moving them to an anti-abortion state and daring the employees to follow or resign would be one of the few Not Overtly Illegal ways to do it.

Yeah, I know. That scenario requires a level of foresight on the part of our Great Ketamine Billionaires that I don't know many of them have. I still wonder, though.

What's not up for speculation: Moving your company to an anti-abortion, anti-pregnancy state that's still threatening to close state lines to women in the state who might seek medical care elsewhere is a flatly misogynist move. I imagine "Zuck" doesn't give a shit, and maybe he didn't even think about it, and maybe there's not a damn person anywhere in his orbit who worried their creepy little heads about it for even a moment. Or, you know, maybe they did.

It's an attack on the company's women either way, though. There's just no damn doubt about that part.