In the Developing World, Facebook Is the Internet
Facebook is bringing millions of people online — but at the expense of their digital rights.
2016 was a scandalous year for Facebook. In addition to coming under fire for letting Cambridge Analytica use millions of American users’ data to customize election-related advertising, Facebook’s Free Basics application was banned in India after digital rights activists criticized the company for violating net neutrality norms. Although the ban didn’t get a lot of coverage in Western media, it was just as big of a blow to Facebook’s brand momentum as the Cambridge Analytica incident.
Facebook believes that its growth as a company is directly related to expanding Internet access in the developing world. 72% of Facebook’s current users live outside of the West, and there are about 3 billion people, mostly in the Global South, who still cannot access reliable Internet.
Free Basics provides free data to cell phone users through cooperation with major mobile providers to help close the global Internet gap and conveniently get more Facebook users in the process. As with all free Internet software, however, access comes with some major drawbacks.
