The American Internet company Facebook wants to create 10,000 new jobs in the European Union in the next five years.

This emerges from a communication from the social network that is available to the FAZ.

This will more than triple the number of Facebook employees in the EU - not counting the UK.

The new positions are to be created in an area that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently proclaimed as a central growth area and which revolves around the term “metaverse”.

Gustav Theile

Editor in business.

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According to the latest announcement, Facebook's leadership understands this to mean “a new phase of networked, virtual experiences”.

In the future, online interactions should feel even more like physical exchange between people, according to the text, written by Nick Clegg, chief lobbyist of the group and former UK vice-premier, and Javier Olivan, who is responsible for the group’s most important products on the Facebook board .

"Embodied Internet"

The idea of ​​a metaverse has been electrifying Silicon Valley for several months. In July, in an interview with tech magazine The Verge, Zuckerberg spoke in detail about the concept that he sees as the “successor to the mobile Internet”. It could be imagined as an "embodied Internet": Instead of just looking at content like on the Internet, people would become part of the metaverse. There you can experience things that would not necessarily be possible in 2D: “like dancing, for example, or various forms of fitness”.

The group tries to refute any points of criticism directly.

Both Zuckerberg in the interview and Clegg and Olivan in the new blog post want to dispel worries that Facebook could become the monopoly of the metaverse.

"No individual company will own and operate the Metaverse," says the blog post.

A large part of the next Facebook chapter will be to build the Metaverse "in partnership with many other companies, creators and developers," said Zuckerberg in July.

"Great investment location"

The social media giant is currently under pressure after the revelations of the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen and an hour-long failure of all its apps in public and politics. The group uses a large part of the current announcement to expressly praise Europe as a location: Europe is "extremely important for Facebook", and "we have long been convinced that European talent is world class". The investment is therefore a “vote of confidence in the strength of the European tech industry and the potential of European tech talents,” write Clegg and Olivan.

The EU plays an important role in regulating the internet and anchoring values ​​such as expression of opinion, data protection and transparency in everyday life on the internet. “Facebook shares these values ​​and we have done a lot to defend them in recent years.” The EU has many advantages “that make it a great investment location for technology companies: a large consumer market, first-class universities and, above all, highly qualified talent “, Write the two Facebook managers and refer, for example, to the development of the mRNA vaccine, the rise of fintechs or developments in some European countries.

Various US corporations have announced high investments in Europe.

Amazon is building logistics centers across the continent and investing in research locations.

Google announced just a few weeks ago that it would invest around one billion euros, primarily in new cloud infrastructure in Germany.

Facebook now employs more than 60,000 people around the world.

In 2019 and 2020 alone, the number of employees rose by almost 14,000 from 45,000 to almost 59,000.