Canadian tech firm Telus International, tasked by Meta to moderate content on its social media networks Facebook and Instagram, will slash over 2,000 jobs in Barcelona, a Spanish union said Monday.

The move comes as Mark Zuckerberg's company has cut its third-party fact-checking in the United States and overhauled its content moderation policies.

Telus, which operates locally as Barcelona Digital Services, said during a Monday meeting that it had terminated the contracts "of all workers who were performing content moderation tasks" for Meta, affecting 2,059 people, union CCOO said in a statement.

According to the union, the redundancy plan was decided after Meta cancelled its contract with Telus, which had provided content moderation for the tech giant since 2018.

CCOO added it had signed a preliminary agreement that will grant "the highest possible legal compensation" for the workers affected.

Contacted by AFP, a Telus spokesman refused to disclose how many jobs would be lost. 

"The priority remains to support the team members affected" by offering them "full assistance, including relocation opportunities for as many people as possible", the spokesman said.

UGT, another union that signed the deal, said the redundancies would be spread out during May, June, July and September.

"The moderation sector requires the professionalisation that these workers offered," it said in a statement.

Meta had not responded to a request for comment. In April, the California-based company said the end of its contract with Telus's Barcelona site would not mean a reduction in its content revision efforts.

'Politically biased'

Meta invested heavily and hired thousands of content moderators globally over the years to police sensitive content. It has also used third-party fact-checkers.

Roughly two weeks before President Donald Trump's January inauguration, Zuckerberg said his company would replace US-based fact-checkers with a system of community notes similar to what is used by X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg said "fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US."

Meta also said it will stop proactively scanning for hate speech and other types of rule-breaking, reviewing such posts only in response to user reports.

The company's announcement echoed many of the complaints made by Republicans and Musk about fact-checking programmes that many conservatives see as censorship, a claim professional fact-checkers reject.

AFP is involved in a partnership with Meta providing fact-checking services in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.