Facebook to hire 1,000 people in London this year

Facebook said it will hire 1,000 people in London this year in roles such as product development and safety, Reuters reported.
Facebook for SME
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg will announce the new jobs, which will take its total UK employees to more than 4,000, on Tuesday before traveling to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The world’s largest social media network said London is the biggest engineering center outside the United States.

Facebook said over half of the jobs will be in technology, including software engineering and data science, Facebook’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Nicola Mendelsohn said.

Other roles will be in the community integrity team, which makes products to detect and remove harmful content from platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Nicola Mendelsohn said London’s appeal was not only in its technology ecosystem but also the strength of its creative industries.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Facebook’s growth was great news. “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,” he said.

The company is trying to rebuild trust in its platforms after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, in which a British political consulting firm collected data from Facebook for voter profiling and targeting.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s public affairs chief and a former British politician, said on Monday that the company will do a better job of preventing bad actors from manipulating this year’s U.S. presidential election than it did four years ago.

Facebook has commissioned research to show the economic benefits its platforms bring to businesses in Europe.

The study by Copenhagen Economics, which questioned 77,320 businesses across 15 countries, estimated Facebook apps helped create 208 billion euros or $230 billion of economic value last year. “That has also resulted in 3.1 million jobs in Europe as a result of people utilizing our platforms,” Nicola Mendelsohn said.

Related News

Latest News

Latest News