Mark Zuckerberg, connecting the world one country at a time. But how far will he go? Image credit: quartz.com

As Facebook grows, only 1.1% of Eritrea’s population is online

Facebook is getting the next billion online.

I stumbled upon an interesting fact yesterday: in 2015, only 1.1% of Eritrea’s population was online. That’s almost 70,000 people of of a population of around 6.3 million. When you consider that the UK has 92% online out of a population of 64 million — that’s 58 million — it makes your mind boggle. Put it this way: you could fit the entire population of Eritrea that has access to the internet inside most large football stadiums in the UK or Europe. Or, Apple sells enough iPhones everyday to supply to the entire population of Eritrea, ten times over. (For reference, Apple sold 78 million iPhones last quarter, which is just a bit 690,000 a day.)

These numbers are staggering, both on a small and large scale. But here is something bigger: Facebook is rapidly closing in on two billion monthly active users; it will hit the figure by June if current growth continues. This is a company that was formed in 2004 and has a 32-year-old CEO, who is also one of the richest men in the world, and is considered a candidate to run for President of the United States at some point in the future. That means 0.0035% of Eritrea’s population is on Facebook — if all 70,000 use it, that is.

Map of Eritrea. Image credit: mapsofworld.com

This also means that Facebook has a large chunk of the population of the internet. Around 3.5 billion are connected currently, so Facebook has 57% of those people. That’s a scary number, especially when you think about similar social networks: Snapchat has 158 million daily active users, and Twitter has around 315–320 million total. When you look at it like that, Facebook does not need to be scared of Snapchat at all, and even less so of Twitter, which is floundering.

The real issue comes when Facebook uses this power in largely nefarious ways. The company has Internet.org, a non-profit which is devoted to connecting countries in Africa, Asia, and South America to the internet. (Although Internet.org hasn’t hit Eritrea yet.) However, because it is owned and operated by Facebook (in partnership with six other technology companies), these users are encouraged to join Facebook as a way to communicate online. This is ostensibly Mark Zuckerberg’s way to ‘get the next billion online’ and ‘connect the world,’ but in reality, it’s just a ploy to get more users on Facebook.

Is Mark Zuckerberg the good or the bad guy?

There are also criticisms of anti-net neutrality against Internet.org. Put simply, the company restricts access to what users can see and do on the internet, making certain services free while others are restricted. Naturally, citizens are encouraged to visit and use Facebook, so they get tied into the service, as two billion other people are. Indian journalist Mahesh Murthy said it was “a Facebook proxy targeting India’s poor.” India is huge market to be exploited, and because it has the highest number of poor people in the world — 276 million live below the poverty line, as defined by the United Nations — it is ripe to be connected, a.k.a exploited by Internet.org and Facebook.

So, what does all this mean? To me, and likely to many others, it is clear that Facebook wants to ‘be the internet’. You can buy, sell, message, post, read, watch, play, write — all on one service. That scares me. Facebook is already one of the most visited sites online, storing vast amounts of our personal data. What happens if Facebook is hacked, or goes down? With our increasing reliance on technology and the internet to see us through our daily lives, Facebook becomes more important than ever, but what happens when it turns against us?