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Facebook to expand in UK, hiring 1,000 new workers
Facebook Inc. will hire 1,000 new staff in the U.K., bringing its total number of staff there to 4,000, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced today.
Half the new roles will be focused in technology development, such as positions in software engineering and data science. The rest of the jobs will be positions in content moderation.
The announcement comes after the company has lost the trust of some sections of the public to fight abusive material appearing on the platform.
“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,” Sandberg said in a statement. “They will also help us build the tools that help small businesses grow, compete with larger companies and create new jobs.”
Sandberg, who’s in London before she heads to the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that the U.K. capital is Facebook’s biggest engineering hub outside of the U.S. The company is also set to build two new offices in London starting in 2021, with the potential to house 6,000 work spaces.
This announcement follows an 18-month investigation whose results were published last year, after which a U.K. parliamentary committee said the company needed to be reined in. The scathing report detailed instances of data breaches, as well as the spread of disinformation and harmful content. The committee called for a regulatory body to oversee Facebook’s operations.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might still introduce new legislation to tackle harmful content, although news of the expansion might appease some of Facebook’s biggest critics in the country. Johnson called the new jobs “great news,” saying it points to the strength of the U.K.’s dynamic tech sector.
“The U.K. is successfully creating both homegrown firms at the forefront of cutting-age technologies, such as artificial intelligence, whilst attracting established global tech giants like Facebook,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are committed to making the U.K. the safest place in the world to be online, alongside being one of the best places for technology companies to be based.”
Photo: Giuseppe Milo/Flickr
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