The technology dispenses with the services of Télus Digital, which for years was responsible for filtering sensitive content for Facebook and Instagram. The news comes shortly after the turn undertaken by Mark Zuckerberg to reduce content moderation.
The subcontract in charge of moderation of target content in Barcelona closes its doors, in a decision that can lead to hundreds of layoffs in the coming weeks. The Téus Digital company, which has been filtering sensitive content for Facebook and Instagram for years, communicated yesterday its workers in the city that the technological led by Mark Zuckerberg has dispensed with its services.
As a consequence, the Office in the Tower Glòries de Telus was yesterday without activity and its near 2,100 employees were sent home with a remuneration permissioneither. According to knowledgeable sources of the measure, the workforce could no longer access the facilities or email.
Virtually the entire activity of Télus in Barcelona was for the goal, so the termination of the contract, if there is nothing that avoids it, leaves “without effective work” to the entire template. The announcement is so recent that Téus has not yet launched any employment regulation file (ERE), not even temporary, nor have there been dismissal notifications, according to the same sources.
The news of the closure arrives three months after Mark Zuckerberg, in a historical turn, announced the elimination of data verifiers on Facebook and Instagram to congratulate the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and follow the same community formula as X, the social network owned by Elon Musk.
The accusations of Trump’s related sectors that social networks have practiced censorship and limited freedom of expression for years, together with a cultural change among its users, motivated Zuckerberg to take the step. Stop eliminating content has an immediate derivative: thousands of moderators are left over.
As confirmed by, the closure in Barcelona is motivated by the transfer of services to other locations and denies that it has to do with a reduction in moderation tasks. The group says with the most sophisticated integrity measures of the industry and have about 40,000 people working in security, including 15,000 content reviewers.
In addition to the transfer to places where labor costs are cheaper, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking an increasingly important role in the world of moderation, since it allows to supervise what is published in the networks without human intervention, especially in the case of violent or disturbing content.
In the eye of the hurricane
The Barcelona moderation center had been in the eye of the hurricane for some time, since some employees have denounced the conditions to which workers were submitted by having to visualize, in addition to conventional material, videos of murders, torture, rapes and even suicides live, with the impact that that can have on mental health.
The last controversy, which is judicialized, is the fact that the subcontract paid different salaries depending on the origin of the workers.
In Barcelona, Téus is responsible for the control of content in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian or Portuguese, among other languages. Its employees are better paid than the average of the contact center sector.
