How Facebook became indispensable in Africa with its ease of access, importance to small businesses, its facilitating of community organizing, and more
Nesrine Malik / The Guardian : Tweets: @nwstein , @protagorasto , @skepticafro , @nesrinemalik , @wolfiechristl , @samhaselby , and @glynmoody Tweets: Nick Stein / @nwstein : After following @Google moves for years, the least innovative platform @Meta is now following cigarette companies. 🤮 https://www.theguardian.com/ ... @protagorasto : This article does a good job of painting how ubiquitous and important Facebook the blue app is in emerging markets. Worth a read if you're in US/Canada where it's positioning is very different. “Across Africa, Facebook *is* the internet.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ... @skepticafro : '#Facebook presents its free internet initiatives in #Africa as #philanthropy, but they are also likely to be a way for the company to reposition itself, as users log off in the west...Facebook's overtures may have sinister implications' https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Nesrine Malik / @nesrinemalik : Tobacco companies migrated to emerging markets once the potential in the West was diminished by landmark lawsuits, regulation and awareness raising. Facebook is now doing the same. Facebook's Second Life in Africa | Nesrine Malik https://www.theguardian.com/ ... @wolfiechristl : “Across Africa, Facebook is the internet. Businesses and consumers depend heavily on it ... for many people, Facebook is not only indispensable but unavoidable” https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Sam Haselby / @samhaselby : “Across Africa, Facebook is the internet. Businesses and consumers depend heavily on it because access to the app and site are free on many African telecoms networks, meaning you don't need any phone credit to use it.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Glyn Moody / @glynmoody : Facebook's second life: the unstoppable rise of the tech company in Africa - https://www.theguardian.com/ ... “Across Africa, Facebook is the internet.” not good...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is the capstone of a five-year arc of coverage tracking Facebook's expansion into markets where it faces the least scrutiny. It began with Zuckerberg's 2017 manifesto framing connectivity as a mission, continued through the post-Myanmar pivot toward working with civil society groups to get people online, and darkened with warnings about Zuckerberg's power operating with little oversight.
What Nesrine Malik adds is the demand-side case: across Africa, Facebook is not one app among many but effectively the internet itself — the storefront for small businesses and the tool for community organizing. That indispensability is precisely what makes the earlier warnings concrete, from activists' fears about misinformation in African elections to researchers' claims that moderation during Ethiopia's civil war fell largely to volunteers.
First-order effects
- Small businesses and organizers who run their commerce and communities through Facebook have no equivalent fallback if the platform moderates poorly or changes terms — their entire digital presence sits on one company's infrastructure.
- Meta now holds market positions in African countries that would be unattainable in the US or Europe, where regulators and competition have constrained the same playbook.
Second-order effects
- Western regulatory pressure gives Meta a structural incentive to deepen investment in low-regulation markets like Nigeria, where its infrastructure build-out doubles as market lock-in before rivals arrive.
- Local civil society groups are being pulled into an unpaid governance role — the Ethiopia reporting suggests volunteer moderation substitutes for corporate investment, shifting the cost of platform safety onto the societies least equipped to bear it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, global platform governance splits into two regimes: regulated markets where Meta negotiates with states, and markets where the company's ubiquity precedes any oversight at all — making 'Facebook is the internet' a self-reinforcing fact rather than a metaphor.
- The tobacco-industry comparison raised by critics points toward a longer fight over whether emerging-market governments will treat dominant foreign platforms as essential infrastructure to be regulated, or as growth partners to be accommodated.
The trend: As Western regulation tightens, platform power is consolidating in emerging markets where Facebook's infrastructure and ubiquity outrun local oversight capacity.