Facebook is such a powerful and pervasive global system that confronting it demands radical new thought. It reaches more than 2.3 billion people, and that means more than 2.3 billion people regularly post videos, photos, and text to Facebook. They do so in more than 110 languages. The very idea that Facebook can police itself is absurd.
Beyond scale, Facebook operates across most of the world without serious competition for advertisements or attention. Among the five social media platforms with more than one billion users, four of them (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram) are owned by Facebook. The fifth, WeChat, operates primarily in China, where Facebook does not. The only platform that competes for attention with Facebook at that scale is YouTube (owned by Google), with about 2 billion viewers. But it performs different functions in our lives.
Here is the trick: Facebook operates globally but works differently locally and regionally. People use Facebook differently in the Philippines, where it is close to the only source of information and method of personal communication for most citizens, than they do in Germany, where it is fairly peripheral to people’s daily lives. Even India and Sri Lanka have very different experiences with Facebook and WhatsApp because they have distinct histories and political systems.
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