Millions of Facebook users are not up to date on the internet

Three years ago, Indonesia conducted a survey . People said that they did not use the Internet , but enthusiastically talked about the time spent on Facebook. For these people, the Internet simply did not exist, but there was a social network. In Africa, faced with the same trend. Researchers thought that a mistake had crept into the calculations - the number of Facebook users far exceeded the number of Internet users.

But everything is going according to plan. According to the plan of Facebook.



To test the results, Geopoll research company interviewed five hundred people in Indonesia and Nigeria by telephone. The question is simple: have you used the Internet in the last thirty days? And the same thing about Facebook. The survey showed that more respondents use the Internet. But in Indonesia, 11% said they didn’t use the network, but sat on Facebook. In Nigeria, the figure was 9%. And these were not pensioners; the average age of the respondents was 25 years in Indonesia and 22 years in Nigeria.

At least a few million people around the world out of 1.4 billion Facebook users are mistaken in these matters.





More than half of people who don’t know that they’re on the Internet say they never follow Facebook links. And a quarter of those who use the Internet do not click on such links. The more users remain inside the social network, the better performance the network can provide to advertisers.



In developing countries, many simply do not share the concept. Below are the results of the survey: do you agree that “Facebook is the Internet”.



Telecommunications operators are confused to offer special rates. For example, in India, for $ 2.5 a year, you can buy a tariff for accessing only Facebook, at the lowest cost of an Internet tariff of ten dollars a year. In the Philippines, such a tariff costs twenty percent of the regular price. In the Republic of Ghana, they sell a qwerty-phone with the letter “F” in the center. Even in the USA there is a tariff plan for Facebook and Twitter.



Since 2013, Facebook talks about the desire to give Internet access to the whole world . But COO Cheryl Kara Sandberg notes that people confuse the Internet and Facebook. They go to the store for a smartphone and say “I want Facebook.” And ultimately it helps the social network grow. Internet.org applicationreferred to in the context of network access in developing countries, in six countries provides access only to Facebook, Facebook messenger and several other useful applications. Only Wikipedia helps to go beyond a closed information system. There is also a search from Google, but if you click on the result, you will be offered to buy a tariff .

So affordable internet is a bit like fiction. This is not an open platform, but a proprietary offer that allows Facebook to show better results and earn more money.