After harsh criticism, Facebook quietly pulls services from developing countries
There's several distinct issues intermingled in this reporting, muddying the lessons.First, there's issue of ethnic violence in Myanmar, fueled by hate speech on and off of Facebook. While the article acknowledges that Facebook's digital distribution allowed hoax stories designed to incite ethnic violence to spread very fast, it says a lot about a society when isolated instances of trolling can lead to real people being killed. It said a lot about the US' fears and anxieties when foreign agents were discovered to have been generating content to amplify sectarian divisions, but it was also remarkable how similar their products were to organic content produced by various factions of true believers within the US. If domestic agents are posting hate speech in Myanmar, the only explanation is that Myanmar is a sharply divided tinderbox with many prejudices and preconceptions, and some people will latch onto a rumour that in their mind provides the necessary justification to commit violence and murder against another ethnicity. It's difficult for me to accept the article's insinuation that in such an environment, Facebook must somehow do more to counteract the undercurrents of society.Then there's the issue of Facebook and certain websites being zero-rated on some phone networks. This is popular in countries where no organized lobby against it exists, and has been withdrawn in some places where activist groups have succeeded in framing it as a foreign company picking winners and losers. Zero-rating is the new frontier in net neutrality that was punted even in the US, where the old FCC never banned it outright, the new FCC is declining it investigate it, and telcos are vertically merging with content providers, which seems to lay the groundwork for more zero-rating to come.