Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about privacy protection in Africa, the launch of Facebook Zero – their free mobile services offered with more than 50 operators around the world – has some important implications for developing countries. I wanted to consolidate some comments I’ve made elsewhere about this development.

The Impact on Local Innovation

Let’s be blunt: barring some strange vagary, Facebook Zero is going to be a hit. Facebook is already popular in Africa, and in other developing countries, such as Indonesia, we know that usage is overwhelmingly through mobile devices. The success of MXit in South Africa, as well, is strong evidence of the viability of mobile-based social networking, and with free access to 0.facebook.com, the proposition is even stronger.

What does this mean for Africa’s burgeoning technology entrepreneurs? The mobile phone is an exciting, preexisting platform for services and applications. CellBazaar in Bangladesh and M-PESA in Kenya are standout examples of the value that can be created from building new mobile services. Competing with Facebook is going to be very difficult, especially when so many carriers are picking them and giving them the ability to not charge for data usage on 0.facebook.com. To be clear, I’m not opposed to Facebook competing in this regard. They are clearly doing good business.

But in the midst of doing good business, they could cannibalize African jobs. For example, Safaricom, who has not partnered with Facebook, just announced they are working with MXit to bring the South African service to Kenya. Erik Hersman sees this as a missed opportunity for local entrepreneurs. The real problem, though, is that the operators in Africa can choose winners and losers on their proprietary networks. New entrants (the proverbial “next Google or YouTube”) face very steep transaction costs that limit their scale.

A Caveat?

As Prabhas Pokharel of MobileActive points out, though, there is more to this story. Speaking recently at the GSMA World Congress, a Facebook representative showed that when Vodafone in the UK offered one week of free Facebook, not only did data usage shoot up, it stayed up: “the number of people paying and using data plans increased by 20% from the people that tried it.”

No wonder Facebook was able to partner with so many operators: in time, they will phase out the free access and will have convinced more users to sign up for the lucrative data plans. Is this a good thing? As Steve Song and others have argued, mobile usage costs in Africa can be very high. There might be reasons to worry that people are spending money recklessly on mobiles, to the detriment of savings or “better” consumption.

But there could be a silver lining. Data services provide more flexibility and capability. Oftentimes people do not even know their phone is capable of anything more than SMS and voice. If Facebook Zero encourages people to responsibly use the mobile Internet, there will be opportunities for many more entrepreneurs and delivery of richer services.

Facebook Zero as Africa’s Agora?

Steve Song is more bullish on Facebook Zero, despite having well-founded critics of both Facebook and African telcos. He says,

I think the potential for innovation with Facebook Zero is really about people having conversations, exchanging ideas about any and every aspect of their lives. Those conversations will spawn innovations. Right now, Facebook Zero only covers ten countries in Africa but supposing in covers all or most of them. Think of the scope for new ideas to find their way across the continent or across the road.

This is an interesting angle. Though it is starting to change, Africa lacks participatory media. Facebook, despite being used for plenty of inane purposes, does have the potential to encourage both innovative thinking and, perhaps more likely, political activity and awareness.

But, again, I think there are reasons to be pessimistic. Is Facebook really the platform we want for this? For one, it is another intermediary on which pressure can be placed. Even worse, it is an intermediary that does not have a good track record on safeguarding political speech within its bounds (see Rebecca MacKinnon’s recent post on the human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension). Frustratingly, Facebook has also not joined the Global Network Initiative, an effort by corporations and NGOs to promote self expression and privacy in a digital world through corporate best practices. Entering places like Tunisia with Facebook Zero demands thoughtful reflection on a company’s role in facilitating political activity.

So, it is, of course, too early to tell the implications of what was certainly a big week for mobile and development, but for this specific initiative, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned.

[As always, I'm speaking only for myself on this blog.]

Facebook recently unveiled a new mobile version of their site aimed at developing markets called 0.facebook.com. The site is optimized for mobile networks and devices, but the real coup is that Facebook has partnered with more than 50 mobile operators to offer the service for free. Leaving aside increased fragmentation of the Internet and what this means for local entrepreneurs trying to build the next MXit (both important issues), I wanted to consider the privacy implications of this.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Facebook has an abhorrent record on privacy protection. Stemming from its founder’s quixotic views and a financial incentive to expose user information, Facebook has used frequent policy changes, byzantine controls and double-speak to push the nearly 500 million users to a situation where they have far less ability to control who has access to their personal information. In the U.S., and even more so in Europe, there are institutional manners in which this is partially combated. Regulatory agencies can direct behavior, advocacy organizations can promote change, and the media can raise awareness. While we are certainly not in a perfect situation, I fear the developing world is in far worse shape.

Facebook is already popular in much of Africa. Users already access it from their mobile phones. But free mobile access is likely to even further drive adoption and use throughout the continent. Over the years, Facebook has made its lack of commitment to privacy clear; 0.facebook.com is not going to change that. But do African nations have sufficiently capable consumer protection agencies? Do they have NGOs focused on the emerging issues of digital life? Is the media providing informative commentary on the implications of the Internet? More fundamentally, are there African researchers examining privacy from a local context? And do users of new media have the literacies they need?

It is essential that Africa takes on this issue on its own terms. Privacy norms, practices and expectations may differ between Nigeria and Nebraska; tackling privacy policy should, too. That being said, international NGOs, and even wealthier countries or donor agencies can play a role.

Take, as a comparison, the issue of gay rights. Homosexuality is illegal in at least 37 African countries and two men were just sentenced to 14 years in Malawi. Amnesty International has taken up the case and is drawing public attention to it globally, the independent Center for the Development of People was formed by Malawians to promote change, and the government is fearful of losing donor funding over the issue.

This is the type of confluence of forces that are likely needed for positive change, whether on gay rights or privacy protection. Will Africa reach it for the latter?

[*Apologies, as always, for grouping "Africa" together as one entity. It's not. I know; I'm guilty.]

It’s been impossible to miss the discussion of the role that social media is playing in the current insurrection in Iran, but the risk of adding to the echo chamber, I want to posit two quick points that are largely being missed in the breathless media accounts:

1. Every modern political conflict will utilize digital technologies, and
   
2. Technologies are, at least in the short term, politically neutral.

In the past couple years, technology’s role in conflict in Ukraine, Burma, Kenya, Colombia, Moldova and now Iran has been given increasing coverage. Almost invariably someone will point to SMS, Twitter, Facebook, or some other digital technology and claim that it is having a determinative effect on the events unfolding.

Though there certainly needs to be more research in this area, I think the role of these technologies is often far overblown. In fact, calling this or any other large-scale social movement a “Twitter Revolution” is myopic and belittles the very real danger those involved are taking. Bullets may beat tweets, but people marching beats tweets, too.

Technology isn’t the main event in #IranElection because these technologies are now so deeply embedded in our societies that, without fail, they will be used in political conflict.

Secondly, although some very smart folks will disagree with me, I do not believe it makes sense to speak of SMS, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr as inclined to support a particular political view. They can certainly help dissidents: Ethan Zuckerman and Gaurav Mishra point out how Twitter’s main role is as a broadcast medium for sharing news from inside the Iran conflict. But looking closely, and you can see that smart oppressive regimes can make use of the same tools: Twitter and the Iran hashtags are being monitored by security services who are also creating false users to spread misinformation and propaganda.

This political neutrality is lost on Thomas Friedman, whose column today argues that the digital realm provides a sphere for moderates to gather and mobilize:

What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.

For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.

Having spent the morning at the launch of the Berkman Center’s Arab blogosphere report, Friedman’s wishful thinking was all the more painful to read. While online tools are useful to marginalized groups if they have connectivity (and that’s a big if), they are just as useful to extremists.

Take, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood who are strongly represented in the Arab blogosphere. Or consider the numerous Jihadi websites and forum, often hidden behind passwords, that are a central gathering space for just the type of people Friedman claims have no need for the Internet. They, too, use what Friedman calls the “Virtual Mosque” (and perhaps it is fitting, because a Mosque can, of course, be a gathering point for moderates and extremists).

As Nicholas Kristof points out in his far more thoughtful column, some technologies would seem to have a higher marginal utility to dissidents – take Tor or Freegate – and the USA or others could promote those. (In fact, they have done so already, but they could do more.) However, these, too, will be used by pedophiles, terrorists and copyright infringers. As Jonathan Zittrain pointed out on Charlie Rose tonight and Rebecca MacKinnon writes in the WSJ, when we in the West push for limits to privacy or openness, often in the name of copyright enforcement, national security, or “to save the children,” we risk those dissidents who will certainly be using digital technology in their protests.

We would do well to recognize that technologies are neither determinative of political success, nor are they really worth the breathless reporting.

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In case you aren’t following them already, Gaurav Mishra, Evgeny Morozov, Ethan Zuckerman and Katrin Verclas are all doing fantastic work on these topics.