The bright, planetary next billion of Facebook users

Frederic Filloux argues that Facebook' future is “bright and planetary” because:

The bright, planetary next billion of Facebook users /img/facebook-world-domination.jpg
  • Forget what Zuckerberg said about privacy, data ownership and AI censorship leading to Newspeak. For the moment, “nearly all Facebook’s advertising clients say they’ll stay onboard”, and some argue that Facebook may survive without Western advertising money anyway.
  • Facebook is likely to get one more billion users, even if monthly active users are no longer growing in Western markets, because:
  • in Asia, the user growth rate is spectacular: over the last two years, each time Facebook added one user in North America, it added six users in the Asia Pacific region and four in the Rest-of-the-World (ROW) regions.
  • besides, in many of those areas (especially Sub-Saharan Africa):
  • population is growing fast, and the percentage of people connected to the Internet is growing even faster, with Facebook projects like internet.org deployed exactly to hook up those people
  • Facebook already is the only internet most of those people know about anyway
  • little or no regulation may leave Facebook free to lock up those markets, but also to control new payment systems,or distribution of information over mobile phones (“and perhaps news production too”)

The full story, with plenty of data, other considerations and links, is at “Mark Zuckerberg’s long game: the next billion”. My own humble proposal to avoid this risk is here.