Facebook (unsplash photo)
A seemingly welcome initiative by Meta (formerly Facebook), which promised to connect billions of poor people around the Third World, has in fact caused huge financial losses to the same population it was meant to help, the Wall Street Journal reveals, after internal documents written by company employees .
According to the documents, Facebook has known for many months, and probably more than a year, about serious problems with the company’s software that is supposed to allow citizens in poor countries to surf the social network for free – but so far they have not been fixed.
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The software in question is active in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and more, and offers users who can not pay for mobile surfing programs to surf on Facebook account, when in return they of course get access to its social networks, but also some other sites, at its alleged expense. However, it now turns out that in practice, many users of this “free” route find out in retrospect that their browsing is not at the expense of Facebook, but empties the budget of their mobile accounts, most of which are purchased using the “prepaid” method. Out running it recharged again. Users discover this when the budget runs out long before the time that was supposed to end according to their usage.
Company employees wrote in the documents that the main problem is that the free route does not consider watching video as part of the free surfing, but for some reason does not warn users about it, in violation of our “principle of transparency”. The workers claim that according to their calculation, in 2021 this “leak” of non-free surfing led to free users overcharging $ 7.8 million per month, compared to 1.3 million per month in 2020.
Meta employees defined the problem: “When users are in free mode and believe that the information they are using is covered by their cellular operators, even though these users are actually paying for the information (this) themselves”. A spokesman for the company told the Journal that the company was aware of the problem and “we have continued to work in an attempt to resolve the issue we have identified”. However, instead of a comprehensive solution, he noted that at the moment Facebook simply does not define browsing through it as free, but as “text-only mode”, to try to explain to users that only as long as they watch textual content they do not pay for browsing.
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