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Munya Chimanye
Features Writer
It is often humoured that Facebook and Google share a duopoly of internet marketing.

In 2004, almost six years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched then search-engine, Google, Mark Zuckerberg created the now multi-billion-dollar company Facebook and since then the company has made the word busy appear to be an understatement.

Having achieved the milestone of one billion users in 2013, Facebook’s internet presence leapt from impressive to unprecedented, gradually increasing each and every year since.

As if their user basis was not wide enough, the company’s acquisition of other social media assets continued to grow their market-share on the internet: in 2012, buying Instagram for US$1 billion; in 2014, purchasing Whatsapp for a staggering US$21,8 billion when taking into account the company’s share price at purchase; and not long after, buying Oculus, industry leaders in virtual reality for a further US$2 billion.

According to their company reports, in the year 2020, Facebook played hosts to an approximate 2,9 billion users, Whatsapp to 2 billion users and Instagram not far behind at 1,3 billion users.

Since then, the company has been fielding accusations of attempting to monopolise the social media industry, which, now, considering their acquisitions, could very well be accurate.

These are not the only accusations that Zuckerberg and Facebook have had to combat; they also find themselves under fire for mishandling information and selling data to other companies for financial gain amidst political and social turmoil. In lieu of these accusations, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated the company’s failure to protect the user’s data from British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica; data which was used to sway voters during Donald Trump’s successful election victory in 2016.

It is purported that Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, along with COO Sheryl Sandberg were both named in the original complaint from the FTC; however, the pair were evacuated from danger with a whopping US$5 million payment to the FTC, 46 times more than they would have originally been sued.

Subsequently, the FTC on December 8, 2020, began an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook in the hopes of averting the monopolistic powers the company has gained by forcing them to divert from Whatsapp and Instagram.

Although at appearance it seems unfair for a government body, or in this case bodies because the FTC is supported in this lawsuit by 46 US States, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia, to assert their will over the independent financial dealings of a company public only in the sense that its perpetually-increasing stock is available for purchase, the concern over their growing monopoly and the man behind the wealth seems to be well founded.

On Monday 4 October, 2021, the internet felt just how much of the ubiquitous space users occupy is owned by Facebook.

The service outage was felt across the globe, affecting people the world over as Facebook, as well as all the companies that fall under it, Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus were disconnected from the internet.

Although the cause of the service outage has not been disclosed to the public, this unique event occurred primarily for one reason: the physical infrastructure responsible for Facebook’s servers, along with those of its acquisitions, are centralised for ease of dissemination of information across all of the platforms that fall under Facebook, meaning that an issue with one of their servers would affect all the servers.

This approach to data management makes information easier to manage across platforms that belong to Facebook and facilitate the surveillance capitalism that Facebook has employed with their approach to user data, which has become their biggest asset to date.

The regional effects of this global platform saw many people in Zimbabwe unable to conduct, considering that Whatsapp and Facebook combined make up the greater part of information dissemination in our country.

It should raise incredible concern that the platforms of social media that we rely on in Zimbabwe fall under such aggressive scrutiny for multiple infringement of business fidelity, such as monopolisation, violation of the users’ sensitive data and privacy and a nonchalant disregard for public safety in the promotion of information.  In a country of 14 million people, about five million Zimbabwean are active internet users according to datareportal.com, which may not seem like that many; however, once considering, according to Quartz Africa, 44 percent of internet usage in Zimbabwe falls to Whatsapp, the effects of a data blackout become more apparent.

On Sunday October 3, 2021, a Facebook former product manager turned whistleblower revealed herself to be Frances Haugen.

Among many allegations, Haugen accuses Facebook under the unmediated directive of Zuckerberg of disrespecting user privacy, endangering public safety by supporting campaigns of misinformation, and rejecting suggestions to block off hate speech and bullying which are more than prevalent on the website.

Haugen alleges Facebook uses the negative energies on social media to perpetuate user engagement, keeping them online for longer, allowing the spread of additional advertisements that would in the best case lead to customer acquisition for brands that market through Facebook.

On top of this, she alleges that Facebook chooses the news stories that are pushed forward to demographics, handicapping the Fifth Estate, especially in third world countries like Zimbabwe where a lot of information is first found on Facebook and then shared through applications like Whatsapp.

Amidst allegations and confusion, China and other similar states, where Facebook and other social media applications are banned, find themselves unaffected.

China already possesses a flurry of applications through which its citizens are able to share and consume information, such as: WeChat, the Chinese solution to Facebook; Sina Weibo, an alternative to Twitter for Chinese citizens; and Tencent QQ, an option for instant messaging aside from the Facebook-owned Whatsapp.

This writer is not suggesting that Zimbabwean citizens turn towards Chinese applications to seek refuge from suspicious data handling and unexplained network blackouts, neither is he indicting Zimbabwean programmers and inventors.

The writer merely wishes to inform so that citizens of Zimbabwe know that it is possible for a well designed domestic application to capitalise on the empty social media market space available in Zimbabwe. One reads countless stories on the innovation in Zimbabwe over Whatsapp where businesses make themselves available to the wider public by moving a portion of their operations to the application or young entrepreneurs that capitalise on Whatsapp’s market share in our country to discover ways in which to feed themselves.

Questions stand in these actions.

Questions to which we are the answers.