Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Dear Facebook, don’t replace internet with social media!

A lot of us have changed our Facebook display pictures in tricolor lately to support the Digital India campaign launched by our honorable Prime Minister, a move towards making every city in India a “smart city”.
But a basic question that hits my mind is how can we support such an initiative by just changing our display pictures on a social networking site that has nothing to do with Digital India initiative (YET)?
What is Digital India? 
Firstly, we need to understand the real meaning of Digital India and that is nothing but making everyone connected through a medium called internet. But these days, the social media giant Facebook looks in a race to replace the word internet with itself. THE mastermind behind Facebook, Mark Zukerberg has been known for his smart stunts to gain traction and make dollars. Whether be it stealing the entire got damn Facebook idea from Howard University chaps or the clever internet.org program. He has yet again made it to the charts with his #ISupportDigitalIndia campaign.
#ISupportDigitalIndia- yet another diabolic scam!
The tool was first announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday, ahead of the town hall meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The tool lets users change/ add a tri-colour layer to their profile picture and it says created using fb.com/supportdigitalindia. But soon after this campaign kicked off it was reported that Facebook had classified these pictures in the class tag internetOrgprofilepicture. Thus, it was alleged that Facebook would use these to show that it has support for the Internet.org program. Facebook has recently re-branded Internet.org as Free Basics app.
Such moves clearly indicate that the social media giant wants to replace itself with the term internet. The way we say that “I have internet access”, it wants us to say “I have Facebook access.” Facebook has about 1.4 billion users, same as that of Google. And you would be shocked to know that Google’s P/E ratio is less than half of Facebook’s and so, the stock prices are likely to increase in the coming years.
Beware of Internet.org it isn't internet
Internet.org was a very clever strategy announced last year built under the guise of a not-for-profit mission which of course it was not! And we “the devoted facebook users” welcomed it without knowing the real gig. Actually internet.org is not an NGO but a guise, a division of Facebook, an only-for-profit move. Hope you haven’t got an automated call telling you internet.org can get you free internet access, and press any key to support it. This was another cheap move by facebook offering a diabolical scam.
Such campaigns are not just about pushing Facebook to the throats of the unwired but to make sure people don’t use Google or any of such services to access the internet. Facebook is so desperate about changing the face of internet. In another words it is trying to replace the internet with social media which can make search restricted and prepaid. It won’t be wrong to predict that to have a Facebook account one must have to pay and then after some more time only high and middle classes will be able to afford Facebook as it will soon diverse from being a social media site to a high-end luxury service.