Are these people in the PR department?

Because FB's outward behaviour and actions don't seem to reflect your statements

And hiring 'unlimited headcount' is usually a sign of ticking a box and not actually understanding what needs to be done, i.e. "what do you mean it's still a problem, look at all the people we threw at this!"

They’re friends that work there - software engineers.

The headcount issue was a friend saying they were trying to get more people on their team and the integrity teams had it easy because they could get more people easily.

There was also a lot of internal recruiting to get people working on the integrity teams.

That is fantastic to hear. All media, even the Times, should be looked at critically and has biases. If it is true that they are putting a lot more of their site through scrutiny, that bodes well for the future use of social media in general. It is unfortunate that this job will be largely thankless though. Like in plumbing, you'll only notice the bad jobs, not the good work.

> the goal of which is to stop the kind of manipulation that happened

That's the problem, right there. FB, as a company, believes they can somehow stop propaganda/agitprop from being disseminated on their platform. They are desperately trying to apply pre-emptive filtering, and will fail.

They have no desire to actually work on improving the situation. Once someone has been subjected to this kind of messaging, FB will do nothing to educate the victims. The aim should be two-fold: to minimise damage (100% prevention is just not possible), and to heal the damage done. But no, that would require them to take responsibility.

I have talked with some FB people who are hiring for these integrity teams. When I asked about whether they are willing to take responsibility and educate their users to prevent further damage, the answer was - and I quote: "we don't do that".

They do do that - they have fact checking things below stories and are trying different things to make that better.