Facebook now has a staggering 1.4 Billion users across the world. This means that if Facebook was a country, it would top the population charts after recently having surpassed China. Never the less, Millions of those users are under the misconception that Facebook is the internet .
In a very interesting new research conducted by Quartz, a list of unusual insights about Facebook's user base came to surface. The research was conducted by GeoPoll (full data here ) in Indonesia and Nigeria, by Jana in Brazil and India, and by SurveyMonkey in the US.
In Nigeria, 65% of Facebook users think "Facebook is the Internet" compared to only 5% in the US. In Indonesia, 18% of the respondents said they were internet users while 29% said they used Facebook. As Facebook's head of localization and internationalization has put it,"Awareness of the Internet in developing countries is very limited. In fact, for many users, Facebook is the internet, as it's often the only accessible application."
This alarming research goes to show the type of people that will be shaping the future of the internet. Apart from the obvious topic of discussion here of why this is happening, is what does this mean? Conservatively, it just means that Facebook has deep penetration in economies where even internet is not commonplace. But on the other hand, it also means that Facebook has information about people who don't even have access to the internet and more importantly, education.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://ift.tt/1FDyBri