To be clear, my suggestion was that they should put boots on the ground, not that they should employ bots or ml. There are journalists looking for work and there are media companies with more money than they know what to do with. Facebook could hire local journalists.
I know they won't, because they don't care about the quality of content on their platform. But there's no reason they couldn't hire actual journalists to do actual reporting for their platform, except that nobody is demanding it of them.
Of course they could. But if they did hire local journalists all over the country, those journalists would have a strong incentive to produce content that drives maximal "engagement" on facebook's platform. That's just a recipe for even more clickbait and outrage-driven reporting. No thanks.
No, it's not. All of those companies are extremely averse to putting boots on the ground, preferring software solutions instead.
Proper journalism worthy of the name (e.g. stuff beyond formulaic reporting like sports scores and financial prices), can't be done by software.