• Meta is moving its safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas and other states.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the shifts would help address concerns of bias and over-censorship.
• Zuckerberg's Meta appears to be following the lead of Elon Musk's X in prioritizing free speech.

Mark Zuckerberg is moving Meta's platform security and content oversight teams out of California and shifting staff who review posts to Texas in a bid to combat concerns about liberal bias and over-censorship at his social-media empire.

The CEO of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads' parent company said on Tuesday that the moves would help return Meta to its "roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms."

Zuckerberg wrote that Meta would "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."

California is widely recognized as a progressive state while Texas is traditionally conservative. Zuckerberg likely hopes that shifting oversight of his social networks to red states like Texas will help assuage claims that blue-state liberals are silencing conservative voices.

Meta's chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, confirmed the changes in a blog post, writing that the company will relocate the teams "that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations."

He told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday that Meta was seeking to "rebalance" and "rebuild trust" among users who felt their perspectives were not wanted on its networks.

"We want to make sure that they understand that their views are welcome and that we're providing a space for them to come onto our platforms, engage, express themselves, engage in the important issues of the day or not in the important issues of the day and just whatever it is they want to talk about and share," Kaplan said.

Zuckerberg, Meta's billionaire cofounder and largest shareholder, also laid out plans to replace fact-checkers with Community Notes. He will also lift restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, ease overall censorship and instead focus on stopping illegal and severe policy violations, return civic content to users' feeds, and work with President-elect Trump to resist pressure from foreign governments to make US companies censor more.

Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in late 2022 and rebranded it X, has made free expression a priority on his platform and spearheaded the use of Community Notes as a substitute for fact-checking and censorship.

Musk also shut X's headquarters in San Francisco last fall in favor of operating the company out of Bastrop, Texas.

In the weeks before Donald Trump takes office, he has moved to delay a nationwide TikTok ban from taking effect until he has a chance to make a deal on his own terms that he believes could allow TikTok to continue operating in the US without posing a national security threat.

On Friday, Trump's lawyer filed a brief, urging the Supreme Court to stay enforcement of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that would either ban TikTok on January 19 or force TikTok to sell the company to prevent China's alleged covert control of content on the app.

The Supreme Court had previously denied TikTok's request for an injunction that would have delayed enforcement until Trump takes office, instead planning to rush a decision on whether the Act violates the First Amendment before the deadline hits.

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• The Kremlin restricted access to the global internet in some parts of Russia, reports said.
• Residents were unable to access websites including YouTube, Amazon, and Telegram.
• Russia is testing its own sovereign internet that it can have full control over.

The Kremlin is believed to have cut off access to the internet in some areas of Russia as it continues to build its own sovereign network.

Russia's federal internet regulation agency, Roskomnadzor, restricted global internet access for a day in several regions so that VPNs couldn't bypass it, reports said.

According to local news reports, cited by the US think tank The Institute for the Study of War, Roskomnadzor has been conducting tests to more closely control internet access in Dagestan, a Muslim-majority region in the country's south.

Dagestani news site Chernovik reported that people in the impacted regions, which also included Chechnya and Ingushetiya, were unable to access websites including YouTube, Amazon, and Telegram, even with virtual private networks or VPNs, that use encryption to bypass public internet platforms.

In a statement to Kommersant in November, Roskomnadzor said that the purpose of the tests was to ensure that Russia's internet, RuNet, could be cut off from the global internet.

Russia has long sought to restrict the country's access to the internet, with some websites, including global news websites, inaccessible to normal users.

The Kremlin wants to tightly manage the flow of information available to Russians, with subjects including the war in Ukraine heavily censored.

Some citizens have used VPNs to overcome the restrictions and access information and services on the global web.

Demand for VPNs spiked after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when tougher internet restrictions were enforced, Business Insider reported in 2022.

The ISW said the recent tests appeared to be focused on regions with a history of unrest against authorities in Moscow.

"Roskomnadzor likely intended in part to test its ability to successfully disconnect Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia — Russian federal subjects with Muslim-majority populations and recent histories of instability — from services like Telegram in order to control the information space in the event of instability in the future," it noted.

It said the tests were likely part of a plan to more broadly restrict access to the global internet in Russia.