Facebook Inc. said it has spent more than $13 billion on security and security efforts since the 2016 US election, and now has 40,000 employees working on those issues.
A spokesman said the 40,000 safety and security staff includes outside contractors who focus on material moderation. Facebook said it had more than 35,000 security and security personnel in October 2019.
The new figures – to demonstrate how seriously the company takes safety and security issues – were published in a blog post on Tuesday, following a series of stories in the Wall Street Journal last week using leaked documents. It was shown that despite huge investments, Facebook struggles to combat a number of serious issues including COVID-19 misinformation and illegal human trafficking.
The documents revealed that Facebook’s internal researchers often identified serious problems with inappropriate content or user behavior on the company’s services, but Facebook routinely failed to fix them. The stories called for an investigation by US lawmakers and possibly a hearing on the issues.
The blog post addressed some of these criticisms without specifically citing newspaper stories. The company said that although it has historically been responsive to issues on the platform, it is trying to be more proactive by including safety and security staff in product teams during the development process.
“In the past, we did not address security and security challenges early in the product development process,” Facebook said in its blog. “But we have fundamentally changed that approach.”
Facebook also shared new statistics around its global political ad library, a collection where people can search for political ads running on Facebook or the Instagram photo-sharing app. Facebook said 3 million people use the ad library each month, and the company rejected 3.5 million political or social ad submissions in the first six months of 2021 for failing to provide appropriate information.
Instagram, which was the focus of a story last week in which internal research revealed the company knows its product could be emotionally harmful to young women, said this week that it is considering “nudges”. Which will motivate users to watch healthy content. Take a break from serving, or scrolling.
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.
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