Wednesday 6 January 2016

WHY FACEBOOK DOES NOT CARE AND WONT CHANGE ITS POLICY?

According to my relate observation and conversation with my comrades I discovered that in written all lives matter, but in reality not all lives matter and this is self-explainable through recent sad events that shocked the world and claimed many lives. Above all, the relate French terrorism attacks attracted a lot of media coverage to an extend of Facebook, the world’s leading social media creating a program that enabled its users to show solidarity towards terror victims by putting the French flag as a profile picture which is different to what is done to show solidarity to people losing they lives in Africa or Mideast Syria. I believe at this moment many are wondering why Facebook does not really care and I will explain in the following sub title WHY.

WHY
Firstly it is important to understand that Facebook is a business whose main agenda is to serve its many users, but to issues relating to terror attacks and coverage, I believe face book’s board of directors used two concepts to choose what to cover:

1.       The majority wins concept:
Please observe that this ‘majority wins concept’ did not apply to the board of directors but applied to its users in a way I will explain. France has a population of 66 million people and approximately 22 million Facebook users compared to Nigeria’s population of 173 million and only 6 million users and the same applies to Syria. Therefore, Facebook’s board of directors saw it fit to give coverage to the French crisis due to its many users because it had to protect its interest.  Business first

2.       The ‘where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is’ concept:
This is an extract from a religion scripture that most of us are familiar with and yes the Facebook board of directors used this concept on their choice of coverage. The directors understood that they ‘treasures’ are and will expand more in France and definitely they move payed off because by 2020 the number of users will increase drastically from 22 million to 30 million users compared to Nigeria’s stagnant 6 million users which may increase to 6.5 or 7 million users by 2020. In today’s world and business, remember statistics really matter no matter the situation statistics really matter and I believe the directors had to protect the interest of users using statistics.


NAME OF COUNTRY
GENERAL POPULATION (Million)
FACEBOOK USERS
FRANCE
66.03
22
NIGERIA
173.6
6
SYRIA
22.85
5
KENYA
44.35
1.8

And to those Africans who would want to ask Facebook why it did not react to terrors in Africa and Mideast the same way it did for France, under the humanitarian act that advocates for equality despite someone’s race, geographical location, creed or religion, then it’s important to understand that the humanitarian act or generally human rights do not apply for countries outside Europe and American because:  

In 1789, the France’s national constituent Assembly signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen or Declaration des droitis de l’homme et du citoyen which advocated for equality before it was restored by Napoleon in 1802 and re-abolished in 1848, therefore, it is important to observe that even though France had colonies overseas like Africa, the declaration signed in 1789,1802 and 1848 did not include the natives of the colonies meaning the equalities or humanitarian did not apply to them. And the same applies to the 1948, United Nations General Assembly’s  Universal Declaration of Human Right which represents ‘ a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’, while in the actual sense, Africa was under the rule of the colonial masters 
meaning the human rights did not apply to them.

Therefore, with the above already out lined, I believe it is important for us to STOP crying over ‘the humanitarian act card’, because it does not work and not many understand, hence it is the our duty as Africans to let the Facebook and the world at large our grief, even when we surely know that nothing will change, but a statement has been made and will be they reminder in the near future.


Let us learn to pray for the world #2016resolution#

written by Sishumba Musanda

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