Facebook to grow London office by a third, 'large number' will be moderators
Facebook is mounting a fresh purge of harmful content after committing to recruit an additional 1,000 staff in the UK by the end of the year.
Facebook hiring spree to choke off spread of malicious content
A ‘large number’ of the recruits will be put to work in Facebook’s Community Integrity team where they will help build tools and technology capable of weeding out malicious posts across Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself.
This will help deal with future incidents such as a notorious terror attack in New Zealand in which Facebook was forced to delete 1.5m videos in 24 hours as well as suggestions that a suicide was linked to posts made on Instagram.
Half of the fresh-faced employees meanwhile will be put to work in software engineering, product design and data science, helping to develop products such as Workplace and WhatsApp with further expansion on the cards for the social giants artificial intelligence, augmented/virtual reality and engineering infrastructure teams.
On a visit to London, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said: “Many of these high-skilled jobs will help us address the challenges of an open internet and develop artificial intelligence to find and remove harmful content more quickly. They will also help us build the tools that help small businesses grow, compete with larger companies and create new jobs.”
Prime minister Boris Johnson added: “We are committed to making the UK the safest place in the world to be online, alongside being one of the best places for technology companies to be based.”
Facebook is in process of migrating to a new head office at King’s Cross by late 2021.
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