In both countries, more than half of those who don’t know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook, compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook and the internet. If people stay on one service, it follows that content, advertisers, and associated services also will flow to that service, possibly to the exclusion of other venues. We asked respondents whether they follow links out of Facebook.
The effects of the misconception also are visible in the survey results. (Quartz commissioned limited surveys in just two countries we encourage researchers and other journalists to conduct more large-scale studies.) Considering the substantial percentages-about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys-the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions. But the survey does provide replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya. It would be silly to extrapolate this to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500 respondents each. In an attempt to replicate Stork and Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30 days. And some people access Facebook through phones with only the most basic of online features, in which case it is hard to argue that they really are using the internet in any meaningful way. These can be tricky, too. Some people have more than one account. Facebook numbers come from Facebook’s advertising platform.
These are generally months if not years old. Measuring Facebook penetration versus internet penetration is tricky business. Internet penetration numbers come from national regulators and from estimates by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body.
The dataġ1% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet.
That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. So is Facebook succeeding in its goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet? And what does it mean if masses of first-time adopters come online not via the open web, but the closed, proprietary network where they must play by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rules? But even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook users who don’t know they’re on the internet. Since at least 2013, Facebook has been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet.