Facebook will employ 3,000 more Europeans over the course of this year, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday as part of his Q&A session with the European Parliament. While the meeting was meant to focus on concerns stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a number of other privacy blunders involving the world’s most popular social media network that were reported in recent weeks, little new information emerged from the gathering, with Mr. Zuckerberg mentioning the company’s European hiring efforts on two occasions during the 90-minute session.
Facebook currently employs approximately 7,000 people on the Old Continent and it’s presently unclear where the new hirings will be concentrated or if the company intends to spread them out across Europe. European Parliament members criticized Mr. Zuckerberg over his evasiveness demonstrated on Tuesday which largely mimicked his April hearings in front of two congressional panels in the United States. The 34-year-old said he’s sorry there’s no time for him to answer individual questions but maintained he believes most “broader themes” that emerged from the parliamentary questions were successfully addressed, a notion that numerous EU lawmakers present at the session dismissed.
The Tuesday appearance saw the multi-billionaire apologize over the Cambridge Analytica ordeal once again, reiterating Facebook will do better to protect the privacy of its users going forward by using a combination of artificial intelligence tools and human curators. The firm is also planning to make its advertising more transparent and is currently preparing a new tool that will allow users to see all ads Facebook pages are running at any given moment, with the service being set to debut this summer. European legislators suggested they may send antitrust authorities on Facebook’s case, repeatedly indicating they consider the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant to be a monopoly. Facebook‘s stock largely recovered following the Cambridge Analytica episode from late March, having ended Tuesday NASDAQ trading at $183.80, close to its all-time high of roughly $191 recorded this February.