Why are people still on Facebook anyway?
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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'It's digital colonialism': how Facebook's free internet service has failed its users
Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say
...
“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”
To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.
Incidentally, "Free Basics" and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg's AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist "Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!" and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say "If you don't legislate favorably, we're going to flood your populations' media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition."
Well said.
Countries that gravitated towards the Western tech ecosystem (whether willingly or otherwise) always get enveloped with seemingly no way out.... the only way out is if they stopped rubbing shoulders with fucking Western digital landlords and move towards coming up with state-owned solutions...
but nah screw all that let's just make WhatsApp and Instagram de facto mandatory to conduct most forms of business in West Asia and LATAM
yeah at this point it's just skill issue
Old people. Boomers still use Facebook. Many even use it as their primary news source.
The world is not only USA, Facebook Marketplace is very active in LATAM for example.
It is bc doesn't cost money.
just us oligarchs meddling on foreign affairs yet again. yeah fuck them with rusty rebar, just saying thats not a new or rare occurrence.