Facebook bolsters content control staff
Facebook said it’s adding 500 content control staff in Germany and bolstering psychological support for workers who delete hate speech from its site, amid pressure in the country to crack down on offensive posts.
The social media company plans to start adding workers from the Austrian outsourcing firm Competence Call Center in the western German city of Essen over the next few months, Facebook said in a post on its German site Wednesday.
They’ll supplement what will be 700 post-deleting staff in Berlin who work for Arvato, a unit of Bertelsmann. The 1,200 staffers will work under the direction of Facebook’s so-called community operations team, based in Dublin, and respond to reports by Facebook users.
The issue of violent or hateful postings on the world’s largest social network has gained currency in Germany – where Facebook has 30 million members.
The country’s parliamentary lower house in June passed legislation threatening fines of up to 50 million euros ($59 million) on large social networks that fail to let users report hate speech or fake news stories, or to remove illegal postings.
The problem has gained political charge as Chancellor Angela Merkel, running for re-election next month, threw her cabinet’s weight behind the bill in the spring. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas has pressured Menlo Park, California-based Facebook to do more to quash posts that propagate hate crimes.
The UK has also warned Facebook, Alphabet Google and Twitter to improve their monitoring of extremist and hateful content.
“We’re aware of our responsibility and are going to further intensify our efforts in the fight against illegal content,” Facebook’s managing director for central Europe, Martin Ott, said in the statement.
The company is also building up psychological care resources for the content-fighting staff and speeding up escalation of what it called “difficult decisions” about posts.
In total, Facebook has said it’s expanding its content-control staff to 7,500 worldwide.
Facebook has tried to broaden the conversation beyond just content removal to focus on ” counternarrative” — digital content designed to undercut extremist messages.
Through a project called the Online Civil Courage Initiative, Facebook has given training and free advertising credits to charities and anti-extremist activists to help them create videos and other kinds of posts to counter hate speech.
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