The company promised in 2009 to provide free internet access for its users worldwide, but soon after the group’s public offering, Facebook changed course and began charging countries for service.
Facebook promised to provide free internet to places with poor infrastructure. However, people in these countries were charged regardless of whether or not they had access to the internet.
Facebook FB 1.83 percent claims to be assisting millions of the world’s poorest people in getting online by providing free internet data via applications and services. Many of these clients, according to internal corporate papers, wind up being charged in quantities that total millions of dollars every month.
To entice new users, Facebook FB 1.83 percent struck partnerships with cellular providers in Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, allowing low-income individuals to access a restricted version of Facebook FB 1.83 percent and visit select other websites without incurring data costs. Many of the customers have low-cost cellular plans that include phone service and a modest amount of internet access for a few dollars per month, frequently prepaid.
People using the applications in free mode are being charged unexpectedly by local cellular carriers for utilizing data due to technical faults at Facebook, FB 1.83 percent, which the company has known about and refused to solve for months. They sometimes don’t realize it until their prepaid plans are out of dollars.
Employees of Facebook FB 1.83 percent parent Meta Platforms Inc. FB 1.83 percent acknowledge the issue in internal documents. In an October document, a Facebook staffer noted that charging customers for services that Facebook claims are free “breaches our transparency policy.”
According to a Facebook document, charges made by cellular carriers to users of Facebook’s free-data products increased to a projected total of $7.8 million per month in the year ending July 2021, up from around $1.3 million a year earlier.
Mir Zaman, owner of a convenience shop in Muzaffarabad, transfers cellphone data to Sheikh Imran, a client.
The Wall Street Journal’s Saiyna Bashir took this photo.
The papers seen by The Wall Street Journal were prepared in the autumn of 2021 and are not included in the material made public by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.
Because premium services are seeping into free applications and services, Facebook refers to the issue as “leakage.” “When customers are in Free Mode and assume that the data they are utilizing is being covered by their carrier networks, even if these users are really paying for the data,” it says in internal papers.
According to a Meta spokeswoman, Facebook has received accusations of data leaking from users and is investigating them. “We’ve kept working on resolving the problem we discovered.” He said that the business has minimized the majority of the issue and that work is still ongoing. New versions of free mode, according to the spokesperson, are designated “text only” and don’t prominently show the words “Free mode,” while older versions that are still in use do. He said that the business is working on upgrades.
Free-mode customers are informed that videos are not free when they join up, according to the representative. They should be notified that they will be charged if they watch a video, but this does not always happen. He stated that Facebook is working to resolve the issue.
The estimate of the increased monthly data prices, according to the official, isn’t based on billing information from carriers. Without the purchasing-power adjustment, he estimates that monthly overcharges reach just over $3 million.
One document, in which staff request greater resources to address the problem, states that the problem is “Easy to ignore” since Facebook’s partners—cellular companies—are unaffected. “In reality, it benefits carriers by providing them greater $$,” the paper states.
According to the papers, the unexpected costs are only one of numerous worries staff have about Facebook’s attempts to get people online in locations with limited economic and technological capabilities. The program, dubbed Facebook Connectivity, is one of the company’s most visible initiatives aimed at sustaining growth.
Facebook’s user growth has slowed in developed countries, with the developing world accounting for nearly all of the company’s new users in recent years. Poor yet populous nations like Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Brazil, and all of Sub-Saharan Africa provide the company’s largest potential opportunity.
Facebook is attempting to expand its user base in nations with large populations but poor incomes, such as Brazil. So Paulo in April, as seen above.
Z Carlos Barretta/Zuma Press/Zuma Press/Zuma Press/Zuma Press/Zuma Press/Z
To attract new users, Facebook has invested in programs that get people online, such as building new Wi-Fi services, extending internet cables to new locations, and negotiating with cellular carriers to allow people to use a low-bandwidth version of Facebook and other websites on low-cost smartphones without incurring cellular data charges. (If you’re linked to a Wi-Fi network, you won’t be charged for data.)
According to internal Facebook papers, the free smartphone data initiative would help Facebook attract 10.6 million new monthly users globally in the second half of 2021, according to an August prediction.
The biggest markets in Asia have a population of one billion people, “yet 50% of this population is still disconnected,” according to a May memo seen by the Journal as part of its Facebook Files series last year. He said that “we have merely touched the surface” of prospective clients.
According to the papers, Facebook’s objective is to raise the number of individuals in Asia who go online monthly via its efforts to ten times the existing 1.65 million in the 12 to 18 months after May 2021.
One of Facebook’s goals, according to another paper, is to create a “proactive, positive narrative” for the corporation and to boost its “reputation among important audiences.”
Users like Zafar Iqbal, a 35-year-old high-school teacher in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan’s Kashmir area, are attracted to the free services developed in collaboration with cellular companies. In Pakistan, cellular data is costly in comparison to salaries, so Mr. Iqbal said the free offering allows him to interact without having to pay.
A buddy pointed out to Mr. Iqbal early last autumn that his prepaid data was being drained after using the free software. Mr. Iqbal said that he began tracking his data consumption. He stated he spends between 500 and 600 rupees every month for phone data, which is around $3. He discovered that while using the Facebook app in free mode for four weeks, he used up roughly 100 rupees worth of data.
“This is incredibly expensive where I live, in a developing nation,” Mr. Iqbal said. According to him, his monthly salary is about $175, thus the costs are hefty.
Muzaffarabad is a city in the Kashmir region of Pakistan.
The Wall Street Journal’s Saiyna Bashir took this photo.
According to Facebook documentation, customers of Mr. Iqbal’s cellular carrier, Telenor Pakistan, are charged $14,736.96 in data per day while Facebook is in free mode in Pakistan. A request for comment from Telenor was not returned.
According to the Facebook papers, Pakistani users are being charged an estimated $1.9 million per month for data that is meant to be free, more than any other nation. According to the papers, the issue exists in more than a half-dozen more nations, with the Philippines and Indonesia having the highest estimated costs after Pakistan.
Technical issues are blamed in the papers. Videos, which are the biggest data hogs, aren’t intended to show up in free mode. However, according to the records, around 83 percent of the anticipated additional costs are due to flaws in Facebook software that are supposed to strip them out or inform users of charges if they view films that do appear. According to the records, the situation has become much worse in recent months.
According to the papers, as part of the agreements with mobile carriers, Facebook allows users to purchase data plans via their applications. This is more convenient than having users travel to the cell company’s own website or retail stores, and it allows them to buy data while they’re on Facebook, giving them access to more Facebook content. According to the docs, it’s a means to entice cellular carriers to join the scheme by allowing them to “monetize their users” via Facebook’s free applications.
Facebook is also assisting businesses in transitioning users away from prepaid services and toward Western-style monthly subscriptions by making them available via its applications. Users are paid after they use data under these programs, which Facebook and phone carriers refer to as “loans,” and firms see this as a means to boost consumption.
In March, a computer and phone bazaar in Lagos, Nigeria.
Adetona Omokanye/Bloomberg News photo
According to an internal document, Facebook is assisting MTN NG in Nigeria by having its app “show loans to as many people as possible by increasing loan eligibility parameters.” As a result, according to the document, Facebook’s free-to-use app in Nigeria helps get more people to also pay for cellular data.
According to Brian Boland, a former Facebook employee who led initiatives in poor nations before departing the company in November 2020, the practice of marketing “loan” data plans via an app designed to give free internet connection has risks.
He said, “The entire objective of attempting to give these things is to bring them to those who don’t have a lot of funds.” “I would have been very unhappy with the concept of luring people in with something that would put them in debt.”
Academics, open-internet activists, and governments have questioned Facebook’s efforts to link the world’s underprivileged to the internet. Some people have complained that Facebook prefers its own services above those of other websites. Over the last decade, Facebook has reacted by expanding access to the internet via its free services.
In 2016, India’s government banned one of the programs, claiming it violated net neutrality principles, which state that all internet traffic should be handled equally with no priority given to specific services, according to the country’s telecoms authority.
In New Delhi in 2014, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a mission to enhance worldwide internet access.
Chandan Khanna/Getty Images/Agence France-Presse
“If you can’t afford to pay for connection, it is always better to have some access and voice than none at all,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in Indian media in 2015.
Facebook provides a free data program called Discover in various countries, including Peru and the Philippines. Discover, according to Facebook, provides users access to any website, but it can’t be used to consume data-intensive material like video or music.
Documents kept in-house The Journal cites a research from the University of California, Irvine that discovered that although Facebook information is freely accessible on Discover, content from other websites is not. The records also mention an internal Facebook assessment of the service, which determined Discover “is not operating in accordance with our pledges” to treat all websites equally and enable text surfing from any website.
In Muzaffarabad, a worker at a mobile phone store distributes mobile data to clients.
The Wall Street Journal’s Saiyna Bashir took this photo.
Justin Scheck, Tom McGinty, and Newley Purnell may be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], respectively.
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