On February 2, when Meta Platforms disclosed Facebook’s first-ever quarterly dip in daily users, the company’s finance head mentioned rising mobile data prices as a particular impediment hindering development in India, the company’s most populous country. On the same day, Facebook’s own study about its business in India was uploaded on an internal employee forum by the US tech giant. Several issues were discovered throughout the investigation, which lasted for a period of two years, from the end of 2021 until the present.
According to a previously unreported Meta study, many women have avoided the male-dominated social network because they are concerned about their safety and privacy.
Unwanted contact and concerns about the safety of the content are preventing women from using Facebook, according to Reuters-reviewed research. It’s impossible for meta to flourish in India if women are left out.
Researchers surveyed hundreds of individuals and looked at internal user data to come up with the findings, which included a lack of interest from internet users seeking video material, nudity content, and the perception of complexity in its app design.
A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that Facebook’s growth began to halt last year, when it added a few million members in the span of six months in the country of approximately 1.4 billion people, substantially underperforming sister applications WhatsApp and Instagram.
According to a Meta spokeswoman, the firm constantly invests in internal research to better understand the value of its products and assist develop methods to enhance them. Meta spokesman To portray a seven-month-old study as an accurate or comprehensive depiction of our company in India, however, is inaccurate, according to them.
However, Meta’s chief financial officer, Dave Wehner, did not mention the primary Indian difficulties in a Feb. 2 call with investors to review the company’s performance for the last quarter of 2021. By comparing the current quarter to previous quarters, Wehner stated that Facebook’s user growth in Asia-Pacific was negatively impacted by competition and a lack of COVID activity. A “unique” problem for India is the high cost of mobile data.
Researcher Wehner’s challenges to growth were different from those described in Meta’s first-quarter reports, which stated that Facebook users in India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam were for the top three drivers of daily active user growth in March compared to a year earlier.
Investors and experts are concerned that Facebook’s expansion in potentially high-growth emerging economies is slowing due to concerns about Facebook’s prospects in India. Meta has seen its share price fall by roughly half this year amid a larger tech sell-off.
There were about 450 million Facebook users in India as of November, according to recent study, making it the country with the most users worldwide.
“Consider the company’s strategic position in India and the potential prospects it has there. Results in India may have an impact on the rest of the world.”
Family Refuses to permit the use of Facebook
Facebook researchers and product teams were given a “high-level overview of growth patterns” in India as part of an internal assessment. There was a lot of talk about “gender imbalance” as a root cause of some of the issues Facebook has been trying to address in India for a long time.
Over 75% of Indian Facebook users are men, according to data collected over the past year. Compared to 62% of internet users in early 2020, researchers discovered that this was a far lower percentage.
Facebook’s gender disparity is “far more obvious” in India, according to the report. The authors point to worries about online safety and cultural expectations as some of the factors keeping women away from Facebook.
Female Facebook users indicated “worry about content/photo usage” at a rate of 79 per cent, while 20-30 per cent of all users were believed to have seen nudity on the network in the last week.
A poll performed in August 2021 found that India scored highest internationally on the latter category, with roughly 10% of users in the United States and Brazil reporting seeing nudity in the prior week, compared to less than 20% in Indonesia. Negative material is more common in India than in other nations, according to an internal analysis.
The family’s displeasure. An important reason stated by female respondents in the research for not using Facebook was because their families did not allow it.
The Meta spokesman stated that the online gender disparity was an industry-wide problem and not exclusive to Meta’s products.
In the time between January and April of this year, over 97% of all adult nudity and sexual activity material was removed before someone reported it, according to Meta, which has tripled the size of its worldwide staff focusing on safety and security since 2016.
As an example of the difficulties faced mostly by women, one research presentation depicted the image of an Indian woman strolling down the street wearing the traditional saree, which covers the head and the face.
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Unknown people had sent her 367 friend requests, with remarks like “very lovely,” “where do you live,” and “you look wonderful.” Next to this picture was an account from a lady who claimed that she had gotten 367 friend requests from strangers.
According to the lady described, the remarks ceased once she utilised Facebook’s “closed profile” option, which was launched in India in 2020 and allows users to limit non-friends from seeing their photos and posts.
“Bold product improvements” are needed to address the poor penetration of Facebook among women in India, according to an internal analysis, which said that by June 2021, the function had been embraced by 34 per cent of Indian women users.
Activists working to protect women’s safety online have blasted Facebook for their lack of action in this area. “We have a team of individuals focused only on ensuring sure we are keeping women safe,” the platform claimed in 2019, citing the use of technology to eliminate information that was considered harmful.
In order to help female users in India stay safe online, Meta has established a Women’s Safety Hub and other privacy features such as a profanity filter. According to Meta, women have started more than half of India’s Facebook groups devoted to business since the year 2021.
According to internal studies, Facebook’s growth in India slowed down last year. According to the findings of the study, non-Facebook users generally use the internet to see photos and videos rather than communicate with friends and family.
According to an internal PowerPoint that visually depicted the decline, its annualised growth rate from May to October 2021 was only 6.6 million members per year, compared to WhatsApp’s 71 million and Instagram’s 128 million.
Toward the end of November, Facebook’s user base in India had grown to 447 million, which was less than half the number of Meta users. In 2014, Facebook purchased WhatsApp, which at the time had 563 million users in the country. 309 million people were using Instagram when it was purchased by Facebook in 2012.
In contrast to Facebook’s rapid growth in previous years, this deceleration is a significant development. According to the study, the site had less than 100 million Indian users in 2014, but that figure has more than quadrupled by 2017.
In a statement, a Meta spokeswoman stated that the company does not release country-specific statistics. They said that Facebook was “certainly expanding the significance of video.” they asserted.
According to the report, lower-educated people are another demographic that is underrepresented on Facebook. Various users were put off by the app’s complexity and lack of tutorials, which made it difficult to accommodate the growing demand for information in the country’s many regional languages.
Despite a rise in India’s monthly internet users due to more affordable data plans between 2017 and 2020, the study indicated a fall in Facebook usage among those who said they were on the internet at the time.
According to an internal post that accompanied the study, “India now has more Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts than any other country in the world.” “However, India’s ongoing expansion confronts several hurdles.”
