The Dark Side of Africa’s Growing Attention Economy
Why Big Tech wants Africa’s attention
While watching “The Social Dilemma”, Netflix’s new documentary about how social media platforms profit off our collective attention deficit, I played a quick game of spot-the-Black-people-in-Silicon-Valley.
Out of around a dozen former employees of Facebook, Google and YouTube that were interviewed for the doc, a grand total of ZERO were Black.
The interviewees were mainly people hired in the tech giants’ early years, so the lack of diversity is somewhat understandable.
These days, however, those organizations have grown so big that, if you played the spotting game in some of their newer offices around the world, you might find an inverse ratio of White to Black employees.
African Expansion
The “Social Dilemma” is about how social media companies are really just ad companies who’ve built the most addictive systems known to mankind.
While they’ve arguably had a net positive effect on the world, if they continue to build out their system without restrictions, the documentary warns of a digital dystopia.
Facebook is at the center of the documentary, the tech giant recently announced plans to open a Lagos office next year. But even more important than their growing presence is the kinds of projects they’ve embarked on.
Facebook has announced plans to build a submarine cable system connecting some African cities, I wrote about the implications for net neutrality.
Facebook’s 2Africa cable and net neutrality
On subsea cables and anti-competitive practices
medium.com
But there’s more.
Africa is the youngest continent by population age, the continent also presents the biggest growth opportunity because internet penetration is 39.3%, a long way off the rest of the world at 62.9%.
These giants are, therefore, salivating over the prospects of the younger, newer eyeballs they’ll be able to cultivate.
Nothing is free, even in Freetown
Facebook, for its part, wants more Africans not necessarily to get online but to use Facebook. And there’s a difference.
Its platform, Free Basics, gives users access to a stripped-down version of the site and some handpicked third-party services.
While dressed up as “free” because you don’t need an internet plan to access it, the initiative has created new avenues for Facebook to gather data about user habits and interests in a part of the world where they aspire to have a strong presence.
But they aren’t alone in this. Google recently abandoned Stations, its WiFi program targeted at developing countries. It was marketed as “free” internet access as well, but there’s a popular saying that,
“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”.
Google Stations worked like this — in return for internet access, Google gathered user data, fed it to its ad engine, and served it to its clients.
The problem is that, and we’re back to Facebook again, when that client happens to be a bad-faith actor like Cambridge Analytica, you get what happened with presidential election campaigns in Kenya and Nigeria in 2015.
Equally concerning is the opportunity cost of the time lost to social media addiction.
At the risk of sounding like an African parent, if our youth spend all day scrolling through their phone, where are they going to find the time to build the next big tech giant?
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