Facebook should hire more people instead of relying on machines to detect the presence of fake accounts and bullying on its social network, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday.
In an interview Thursday with Axios, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the social media giant has invested heavily in machine learning to find "bad actors" on its platform.
The company, which has more than 2 billion active users, is also hiring 4,000 more people to increase oversight of ads and content, Sandberg said.
"I do not trust the machines to do what people can do at this stage of the game," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street."
"But it would cost them money to have humans to review and spot check, and yet humans are the only ones right now who can detect this," the host of CNBC's "Mad Money" added. "When it comes to fake news and lies, you actually need a human component."
Congress is currently investigating the role of Russian actors in the 2016 U.S. election, including thousands of advertisements that ran on Facebook. The company is working with Congress to provide information.
Cramer asked whether it would actually significantly hurt Facebook's gross margins to hire more human oversight.
He urged Congress to ask social media companies to put "some humans in charge of the machines."
"This is about the gross margins of these companies," Cramer said. "If they have to start hiring people who are English lit. majors rather than those computer scientists out of Stanford, you would see their gross margins go down."
Cramer added that he has" tremendous respect for machines and machine learning for what's been done algorithmically."
"I think they are fantastic at looking at what I regard as keywords," he said.
CNBC has reached out to Facebook for comment.
— Disclosure: Jim Cramer's charitable trust owns shares of Facebook.