2020 will be the year when social networking giant Facebook will be creating more than 1000 new jobs in the United Kingdom. The new jobs will also include teams who will be helping to handle harmful online content. The company says that more than half of the jobs which will be created will be tech base and will include roles in software engineering, data science and product design. The progress will take UK workforce of Facebook up by 4000. Social media firms in recent times has been stressing on the removal of posts that promote self-harm and political extremism.
Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook will be announcing the new jobs in London on January 21, 2020 and is also expected to travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Facebook is looking forward to make the high-skilled appointments with a focus to help them with the challenges which are put up by the internet everyday and to also develop Artificial Intelligence to find and remove harmful content more quickly.
The new jobs will be more on the community integrity team that designs tools to filter/police the posts on the platforms of Facebook including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Things started to become more serious when teenager Molly Russel committed suicide in 2017 and the firm soon decided to take immediate action. Steve Hatch, the vice president at Facebook in northern Europe said that the death of Molly Russell made the company realize the need for acknowledging the issue more seriously.
Hatch added that it has been planning to put things in place since the past 12 months. Russel was 14 years old when she committed suicide and her father claimed that it was her Instagram account that was partly responsible for his daughter’s death. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying its best to tackle terrorist content and other similar content that promotes self-harm.
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