Millions of Facebook users have no
idea they’re using the internet
It was in Indonesia three years ago
that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly.
Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told
her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk
enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a
researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva,
her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in
their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.
1 “It seemed that in their minds, the
Internet did not exist; only Facebook.”
In Africa, Christoph Stork stumbled
upon something similar. Looking at results from a survey on communications use
for Research ICT Africa, Stork found what looked like an error. The number of
people who had responded saying they used Facebook was much higher than those
who said they used the internet. The discrepancy accounted for some 3% to 4% of
mobile phone users, he says.
Since at least 2013, Facebook has
been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet. But even
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook
users who don’t know they’re on the internet. So is Facebook succeeding in its
goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet?
And what does it mean if masses of first-time adopters come online not via the
open web, but the closed, proprietary network where they must play by Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rules?
This is more than a matter of
semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come
online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. If the majority
of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers,
businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else
interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective,
go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one
company. And that has implications for us all.
The data
11% of Indonesians who said they used
Facebook also said they did not use the internet.
Measuring Facebook penetration versus
internet penetration is tricky business. Internet penetration numbers come from
national regulators and from estimates by the International Telecommunication
Union, a UN body. These are generally months if not years old. Facebook numbers
come from Facebook’s advertising platform. These can be tricky, too. Some
people have more than one account. Some accounts are rarely used. And some
people access Facebook through phones with only the most basic of online features,
in which case it is hard to argue that they really are using the internet in
any meaningful way.
In an attempt to replicate Stork and
Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria
from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile
phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30
days. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500
respondents each.
It would appear, on the surface, that
more people use the internet than use Facebook, a perfectly sensible outcome.
But a closer look at the data
(available in full here) shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used
Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook
users said they do not use the internet. These are largely young people; the
median age of respondents with this combination of answers is 25 in Indonesia
and 22 in Nigeria.
It would be silly to extrapolate this
to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. But the survey does provide
replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya.
Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our
surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4
billion users suffer from the same misconceptions. (Quartz commissioned limited
surveys in just two countries; we encourage researchers and other journalists
to conduct more large-scale studies.)
The effects of the misconception also
are visible in the survey results. We asked respondents whether they follow
links out of Facebook. In both countries, more than half of those who don’t
know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook,
compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook
and the internet. If people stay on one service, it follows that content,
advertisers, and associated services also will flow to that service, possibly
to the exclusion of other venues.
How Facebook became the internet
At Davos this year, Sandberg told the
well-heeled crowd (paywall) that in the developing world, “people will walk
into phone stores and say ‘I want Facebook.’ People actually confuse Facebook
and the internet in some places.” Or as Iris Orriss, Facebook’s head of
localization and internationalization, has put it, “Awareness of the Internet
in developing countries is very limited. In fact, for many users, Facebook is
the internet, as it’s often the only accessible application.” (Emphasis in the
original.)
Facebook is “often the only
accessible application,” as Orriss puts it, but that’s because Facebook—which
did not respond to requests to comment on this story—has worked to ensure that
it is the easiest and cheapest to access. The company backs internet.org, an
initiative to “bring the Internet to the two thirds of the world’s population
that doesn’t have it.” Yet internet.org’s showpiece, an app now available in
nearly half a dozen countries, provides free access only to Facebook, Facebook
messenger, and a handful of other services (the precise lineup varies by
country).
Most of these other services are
well-meaning and related to development: Women’s rights. Jobs. Maternal-health
information. An Ebola FAQ. The only concessions to the wider web are Wikipedia
and Google search. But clicking through on a Google search result requires a
data plan—and that must be paid for by the user. (Despite the name,
internet.org is not a non-profit concern, but very much a part of Facebook
Inc.)
Ghana’s Facebook phone looked like a
Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button.
Telecom operators across the
developing world also contribute to the confusion—though this is something of a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Mobile web users spend a lot of time on Facebook and
WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook). Mobile networks see this and offer these
customers social-only plans.
In India, you can get a Facebook-only
data plan for $2.50 a year (the cheapest full data plans cost about $10 a
year.) In the Philippines, Facebook-only plans cost a fifth as much as data
plans. In Ghana, telecom operator Tigo once sold a Facebook phone. It looked
like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Even in America,
Sprint offers a data plan (paywall) solely for access to Facebook and Twitter.
Finally, there is Facebook Zero,
which predates internet.org and allows users of basic phones to access Facebook
at no cost. Mobile operators have grumbled about this particular arrangement.
Let them. One day Facebook will beam its services from the skies with its fleet
of indefatigable, solar-powered drones.
Why it matters
Facebook bosses generally dismiss
suggestions that the whole internet.org project might be self-interested.
Writing in Time, Lev Grossman was granted access to Mark Zuckerberg when the Facebook
CEO went to India to promote internet access. When Grossman asks whether
internet.org is self-serving, Zuckerberg allows only that it may, one day,
several decades down the line, pay off: “If you do good things for people in
the world, then that comes back and you benefit from it over time.”
Dave Wehner, Facebook’s finance
chief, is more forthright. “I do think that over the long term, that focusing
on helping connect everyone will be a good business opportunity for us.” If
Facebook becomes one of the top services in these countries, he explained in a
recent earnings call, “then over time we will be compensated for some of the
value that we’ve provided.”
That is a fair goal for any
profit-seeking company. And besides, isn’t some access better than none at all?
John Naughton of the Guardian argues that this is not the case:
This is a pernicious way of framing
the argument, and we should resist it. The goal of public policy everywhere
should be to increase access to the internet—the whole goddam internet, not
some corporate-controlled alcove—for as many people as possible. By condoning
zero-rating we will condemn to a lifetime of servitude as one of Master
Zuckerberg’s sharecroppers. We can, and should, do better than that.
“It has very serious implications.
It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and
cherish.”
Already services are starting to move
away from the open web and to Facebook. And it’s happening not just in the poor
world, but in poor parts of the developed world, where there also exists a
sense among some that using an app isn’t the same as using the internet, which
requires a web browser like Safari or Internet Explorer. Salix Homes manages
government-owned subsidized housing in some the poorest parts of Salford, a
deprived area in the north of England. Salix recently decided to accept
complaints and rent payments from its tenants on Facebook.
“We took the view that let’s go where
people are rather than force them to go to our website,” says James Allan, the
firm’s marketing manager. As a result, interactions are up 90% while traffic on
the website has fallen.
Allan is not in the business of
deciding whether Facebook’s omnipresence among less affluent internet users is
a good or bad thing. It is simply a thing. But as LIRNEasia’s Samarajiva says,
“It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the
open internet that we love and cherish.” Yet he is optimistic that Facebook
eventually will lead its users to that place.
“Maybe it will introduce them,” he
says, “to the larger concept of the internet. They’re already on the internet.
They just don’t know they’re there.”
A note on the methodology: The
surveys of Indonesia and Nigeria used through this piece were administered by
GeoPoll, which uses SMS to conduct real-time surveys without the need for
face-to-face interaction in remote areas. This survey was conducted in late
December in Indonesia and Nigeria, with 500 respondents from each country,
equaling a margin of error of 4.38% at the 95% confidence level.
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