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Facebook applications are popular all over the world. But we would all be better off if they weren’t.

The company’s most embarrassing human casualties – its contribution to violence, trafficking and abuses by authoritarian governments – occurred mostly in countries outside of North America and Western Europe, such as India, Honduras, Myanmar, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

What if Facebook pulls out of many countries where its social network, Instagram and WhatsApp apps have done great harm, even if they have given voice to the unheard?

Years of terrible headlines have not led Facebook to make consistent progress in solving its problems. Perhaps it is time for the company to leave countries like Myanmar and Azerbaijan until it dedicates as much money, attention and cultural competence to its presence in these places as it has devoted to its presence in the USA and France. (And Facebook is far from perfect in rich countries.)

I don’t blame those of you who think that an American like me is elitist after “Facebook broke democracy in many countries of the world,” as Filipino journalist Maria Ressa said. told, people in these places would be better off without the site.

But perhaps we should all ask ourselves radical questions about the horrors of Facebook: Is a better Facebook a realistic option or is a smaller Facebook the solution? But what if no one can or cannot operate a highly effective, lightning-fast communication mechanism for billions of people in nearly every country?

There is deep irony in my suggestion that a less global Facebook might be better. The power of people to use the network to express themselves, collaborate and challenge authority is deeper where institutions are weak or corrupt and citizens have no say. It’s also where Facebook is hurting the most and where the company and the world are paying the least.

While reading The Wall Street Journal, I felt a terrifying familiarity. article series About Facebook – specifically detailed how their employees grapple with continued abuses in developing countries, including the ways drug cartels use Facebook apps to recruit hitmen, and the ways governments use the network to incite ethnic violence.

Three years after the United Nations concluded The Journal reports that the Myanmar military has turned the social network into a propaganda tool for the genocide. reporting He suggested that Facebook is repeating some of the same mistakes and allowing this to happen again in Ethiopia.

The magazine wrote that, as in Myanmar, Facebook staff and computerized systems are not capable of understanding the dialects in many encouraging posts. violence against a persecuted ethnic group, the US government said became the target of ethnic cleansing. Ethiopians and Facebook employees warned the company about this risk.

How many times do we need to read similar stories? Sri Lanka, Honduras or Philippines Before perhaps concluding that Facebook can’t work where people are most vulnerable to online abuse?

Facebook tends to say it dedicates significant resources outside of its home country to identifying and deleting accounts that spread dangerous propaganda or are used to mislead or harm people.

It’s hard to imagine Facebook pulling out of the world by election, but doing so wouldn’t be a disastrous financial blow for the company. While it’s true that the vast majority of Facebook users are based outside the US, Canada, and Europe, two-thirds of Facebook’s revenue comes from these regions.

Similarly, Amazon gets around 90 percent of its revenue from just four countries (US, Germany, UK and Japan), and few believe the company’s global concentration is holding it back.

Managing a global internet company is not easy. But it’s also hard to watch the use of Facebook as a tool for ethnic violence and authoritarian abuse and admit that this is a defensible downside of connecting the world.

Before you go …

• The new iPhones are GOOD: Brian X. Chen of the iPhone 13″Might be the most incremental update to iPhone” (You can check out the photos he took of his dogs with the latest models.) It’s okay to have new phones meh. Brian writes that you can keep your phone for years without thinking you’re missing something important.

• We cannot look far. Is it helpful or harmful? My Colleague Katie Rosman explains Why the news media and swarms of online detectives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are obsessed with the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabrielle Petito.

• Wow, everyone is crazy about this new timeshare company: Residents of largely affluent areas such as Malibu and Sonoma, California, neighborhoods are destroyed Vice News is by a start-up called Pacaso that lets people buy second homes with strangers. People with multimillion-dollar homes are worried that the wrong people are buying other multimillion-dollar homes.

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A group of young naturalists in New Zealand found an unearthed fossil. Contains the skeleton of a previously unknown species of an ancient giant penguin. What did you find on your walk today?

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