Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg speaks during a press conference in London to … [+]
Facebook often gets a bad rap. Not content with pointing out its effects on mental health, democracy, and privacy, critics also charge it with extracting value from society–namely data–without giving much in return, particularly to the public purse. Still, even if criticism of Facebook is more or less justifiable, it’s not actually true that Facebook takes from society without giving anything in return.
Or at least, it’s not true if you argue this point with reference to the U.K. Because today, the social media company announced that it will be hiring an additional 1,000 people in its three London-based offices by the end of 2020, bring its total U.K. workforce to 4,000 employees. This is in addition to 500 new roles it announced last year, which Facebook tells me were filled by the end of 2019.
Around 50% of these new roles will be focused on Facebook’s technological development, with new hires set to be assigned to AI, VR, software engineering, data science, and product design.
On top of this, a “large number” of positions will be in Facebook’s Community Integrity team, which works to remove and detect content in violation of the social network’s “Community Standards.” In other words, many of the new hires will be tasked with addressing concerns that Facebook isn’t doing enough to tackle illegal content. An important, if sometimes difficult job.
Facebook also proudly points out that it’s committed to the longer term development of its U.K. operations, with two new offices in London’s King Cross set to open from late 2021 and house as many as 6,000 workstations.
“London is home to Facebook’s biggest engineering hub outside the U.S. and we’re committed to investing here for the long-term,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, announcing the new hires at an SME event in London. “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.”
Of course, expanding its workforce is all well and good for Facebook, which clearly plans to grow its business and revenues despite already boasting at least 2.7 billion monthly active users across its family of apps. However, in what is a seemingly rare exception to its bad reputation, its expansion will also benefit the U.K., as well as the international economy. Not only will an increase in employment have the obvious macroeconomic benefits for Brexit Britain, but its expanding work on such technologies as AI, big data, virtual reality and augmented reality will help drive wider progress in these fields.
And as Facebook grows, SMEs in the U.K. and beyond are likely to grow as well. According to a study published by Copenhagen Economics (and commissioned by Facebook itself), Facebook helped the 7,000 European businesses it surveyed generate around €208 billion in 2019, which works out at around three million jobs. Not only that, but 69% of U.K.-based SMEs affirm that Facebook is now an “important” part of their business, while nearly half of business state that the use of Facebook Messenger has helped them improve customer satisfaction.
So yes, Facebook may be “eating the world,” but it has also become part of the very infrastructure of our new digital era. Millions of businesses now rely on it to reach a wider pool of customers, which means that if Facebook grows, these businesses and the global economy grows. This may be a good or bad development depending on your point of view, but there’s currently no changing that this is now a fact of life.