The job cuts are the result of an agreement reached between the unions and Telus, a Canadian company subcontracted by Meta to filter comments on social networks.

At the beginning of April, Meta announced that it would be doing away with the comment moderation services it had contracted to Telus.

The announcement came after Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg decided earlier this year to end the content verification programme on its platforms in the United States and switch to a system of “community notes” on all its networks, a model similar to the one currently used on X.

The company said that there would be “no new checks or verifiers” and that the sanctions imposed by the verification programme when misleading and fake content was identified would also be eliminated.

Launched in 2016, this programme was based on verification by independent specialist organisations, which provided users with more information about what they were seeing online, so that they had more context and could combat disinformation on these platforms.

The collective redundancy now announced by Telus covers 96% of the jobs the company had in Barcelona, revealed the Comissiones Obreras (CCOO) trade union centre.

The social media conglomerate Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) revealed last week that it made profits of 16.6 billion dollars in the first quarter of the year, 35 per cent more than in the same period in 2024.