Page 64 - Bloomberg Businessweek-October 29, 2018

◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek October 29, 2018

With its main app maturing, Facebook has been
Facebook tightening its control over acquisitions Instagram,

WhatsApp, and Oculus. Founders of all three com-
Hasn’t panies announced their departures this year, most
recently Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe on Oct. 22.
Broadband providers need Facebook, too.
Learned Remote terrain makes connecting much of the
remaining offline world extremely pricey, so
they’re eager for whatever savings Facebook
Anything engineering can bring. The company’s tools “make
our planning work a lot easier,” says Alex Jin-Sung
Choi, a senior vice president at Deutsche Telekom
AG, which is working with Facebook to add net-
work equipment in Germany and Hungary.
● The company is pushing into fractious For years, Facebook has pitched its social network
markets without applying the lessons as a minimalist internet for emerging markets. Free
from its globe­spanning social catastrophes Basics, born of partnerships between operators and
Facebook’s Internet.org project, has been banned in
India for violating net neutrality. Elsewhere, it pro-
At a Facebook-led telecommunications summit in vides an online world with few sources of informa-
London on Oct. 16 and 17, attendees could be for- tion other than what’s going viral on Facebook. The
given for wondering what year it was. The social consequences are clear.
media company’s executives spoke optimistically In Myanmar, government personnel have used
about building tools to connect more of the world Facebook accounts to spread propaganda that’s
to the internet at higher speeds, and mobile oper- heightened tension between the Buddhist major-
ators said they were proud to be using those tools. ity and the Rohingya Muslim minority, who have 27
There was no mention of the spiraling problems been targets of ethnic cleansing. In the Philippines,
Facebook Inc. has fueled around the globe with its a troll army threatens violence against critics of
grow-at-all-costs strategy—not the apparent genocide President Rodrigo Duterte. In Brazil, a combination
in Myanmar, the viral propaganda attacking oppo- of viral posts on Facebook and encrypted messag-
sition politicians in the Philippines, or the election ing on WhatsApp, a Facebook chat application, led
misinformation in Brazil. Instead, employees’ lap- one candidate to call for a federal investigation into
tops carried stickers promoting Facebook’s defunct another candidate’s use of fake news. “The question
Aquila drone project, meant to beam internet access In mid- October, Facebook invited reporters to for Facebook
down to underserved populations with lasers and tour its new election “war room,” where staffers are is how
satellites. It could have been a scene from 2015. working to ban or limit the influence of actors seek- serious are
“We have a growing team of product, policy, and ing to disrupt elections. Brazil’s runoff presidential
content experts who are focused on helping to keep vote on Oct. 28 will be a major test ahead of the U.S. they about …
bearing
the Facebook platform safe in both emerging and midterms. But so far, Facebook’s solutions remain the costs
mature markets,” the company said in a statement largely reactive. The company doesn’t yet have con- of properly
after the conference. “We recognize the important tent moderators for every language it supports, and entering the
role Facebook plays in people’s lives and the need often cleans up the worst of its service only when markets”
to take responsibility for that.” alerted, long after the damage has been done.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg con- This trend made the London summit more than
ceded last year that Facebook’s mission to “connect a little uncomfortable. Onstage on Oct. 16, Facebook
the world” wasn’t necessarily making the world a product manager Vincent Gonguet showed off the
better place. The new goal, he said, was to “bring the company’s latest partnerships with mobile opera-
world closer together.” That aim, however, isn’t as tors: in Uganda, where the government has arrested
closely aligned with Facebook’s business needs. Its opposition lawmakers; and in Indonesia, where the
main app, with more than 2 billion users, is running government has announced weekly briefings to try
out of people to add. Facebook’s shares fell more to counter what it’s calling fake news.
than 20 percent after it predicted a revenue slow- “The question for Facebook is how serious are
DATA: CB INSIGHTS down in July. To keep investors happy, it can’t just they about going into these markets and bearing the
remain massively profitable—it needs to keep grow-
costs of properly entering the markets,” says Matti
ing, which means getting more people online.
Littunen, an analyst at researcher Enders Analysis