20.5. Colonialism and Meta’s Strategy#

We looked at Mark Zuckerbergs “benevolent” goals and saw his failed efforts at being a “white savior,” what about the Meta company? Is Meta being colonialist? What about Meta’s feduciary duty to maximize profits?

Let’s go through our earlier definition of colonialism and apply it to Meta and Zuckerberg’s goals and actions.

20.5.1. Subjugation#

In colonialism, one group or country subjugates another group, often imposing laws, religion, culture, and languages on that group. In this case, Zuckerberg and Meta are imposing their version of the Internet on people around the world. In particular, when Zuckerberg offers free Internt, it only comes with access to a few sites, such as Wikipedia, and of course Facebook. So Zuckerberg is choosing what part of the Internet people get access to. And while the people might gladly accept this deal, the bargain is being made by two people in very unequal positions, and Zuckerberg has almost complete freedom to set the terms of the deal.

See also:

20.5.2. Taking Resources#

In colonialism, the colonialist group also takes resources from the subjugated group. But what resources is Meta getting out of this? Especially if the people they are giving free Internet to don’t have money to make it worth selling ads to show them?

In our view, Meta is getting two main benefits out of getting people with no Internet access onto the Internet with Facebook:

More Behavioral Data#

They get more behavioral data. Even if they can’t sell ads for this group of people yet, they are still accumulating a larger data set with a larger percentage of Earth’s population.

Preventing Competition#

Most importantly, they can prevent a competetor from taking hold. If these people got Internet access through a non-Facebook option, they migth join a new or competing social media network, and throug the network effect, that competing Network might take off. And that would be a threat to Meta trying to corner the market on Social Media.

A particularly telling example of this is the story of WhatsApp:

Though WhatsApp was founded in the US (in 2009), it became very popular outside the US, becoming much more commonly used than Facebook Messenger. Facebook was terified of losing out on the non-US market, since they wanted to control everything, so in 2014 Facebook spent $19 billion dollars to purchase WhatsApp:

WhatsApp was just too far ahead in the international mobile messaging race for Facebook to catch up[…] Facebook either had to surrender the linchpin to mobile social networking abroad, or pony up and acquire WhatsApp before it got any bigger. It chose the latter.

20.5.3. Belief in Inferiority of the Subjugated People#

Finally, colonialism is justified by belief in the inferiority of the subjugated people (e.g., barbaric, savage, godless, backwards), and the superiority of the group doing the subjugation (e.g., civilized, advanced). So how do we see this here?

In the Time Magazine article mentioned in the last section, Zuckerberg focuses on ways he notices that it is worse in rural India:

Zuckerberg said] [“There were, like, 40 students sitting on the floor, and then the guy running it was saying that there were 1.4 million schools and this was one of the better ones,” he said later—he can never resist a statistic. “There was no power. There are no toilets in the whole village!”

But this might not be the whole picture. Perhaps they have different and valuable community arrangements, or stories, or customs, or any number of things that Zuckerberg didn’t care to notice. Or if one of the people in rural India came and visited Zuckerberg, perhaps they would say: “Oh Mark, I see. You have no real friends. That’s sad.” So when Zuckerberg and Meta impose their products (and culture) on people in rural India, those people, and the world might be losing something.

Additionally, Zuckerberg also, ignores how he and Meta (and larger industry and world powers) might have exploited people in rural India and be partly responsible for the poverty there.