American social media and technology company Facebook will create 1,000 new jobs in the UK in 2020, including additional people for its team tackling harmful online content.
Facebook said it will be generating 1,000 new jobs in the UK for the year, more than half of which will be focused on technology, as well as roles in software engineering, product design and data science.
Social media firms have been facing increased pressure to address posts promoting self-harm and political extremism.
The additional jobs will bring Facebook's workforce to over 4,000 people. The new jobs will be announced by Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in London before travelling to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Sandberg is expected to say: "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."
Those roles will be part of the company's "community integrity" team, which designs tools for policing posts on Facebook's platforms including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Steve Hatch, the firm's vice-president for northern Europe, mentioned that Facebook decided to invest more in policing online content, following the suicide of teenager Molly Russell in 2017.
Hatch said: "The tragic death of Molly Russell made us really stop in our tracks as a company and acknowledge that there was an issue that we need to do more on. We've been putting those changes in place steadily over the last 12 months."
Molly's father believed Instagram was partly responsible for his daughter's death. He said: "I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter."
According to Hatch, Facebook plans to build on progress it had made in tackling terrorist content to remove other problematic content such as self-harming. He added that the company has already detected and removed two million posts from Facebook and 800,000 from Instagram.
