Hi, I'm Lucy Pei and I'm presenting our paper "Market, Testbed, Backroom: The Redacted
Internet of Facebook's Discover," on behalf of my co-authors Benedict Salazar Olgado and Roderic Crooks.
So what is Discover? Discover is an app launched by Facebook under its philanthropic arm
to provide limited internet access for free in countries in the Global South.
Prior work has both lauded Facebook's previous free internet initiative and criticized it for
violating net neutrality and privacy. We wanted to enrich this discussion by analyzing how Discover,
the new initiative, situates users in economic and political relationships.
To do this we use document theory, a framework which was developed in documentation studies and
has been adapted for HCI. Our approach frames internet access via Discover as a specific
configuration of costs and benefits, rather than just as distributing a good. In line with this,
we pursue the following research questions guided by document theory structure.
Who is involved in rendering and organizing the websites as they are viewed on Discover?
What is used to render the websites? How are websites organized and made visible on Discover?
And, how do the rendered websites look on Discover? With the help of research associates
based in the Philippines, we systematically collected screenshots of the Discover app
and cataloged the so-called popular websites that were made prominent in the app's home page. Our
analysis of the categorization reveals that rather than being a neutral portal for free internet,
Facebook's categorization and display choices perpetuate the dominance of sites from the
US and also promote harmful malware which are considered popular due to having many redirects.
We further attempted to accomplish tasks on the most popular sites on Discover.
Many of the sites were actually unusable due to the way that Discover is set up to save data
by automatically stripping most images, videos, and other data-intensive features of websites.
Our analysis of the landing pages shows the percentage of redacted space and the
non-functionality of sites that require something like captcha or have key information in images.
So now I'm going to talk a little bit about our discussion points. So while the entirety of the
internet can be accessed through Discover, we found the app to be subtly exclusionary.
By using market-driven appraisal and arrangement in the way sites are displayed on Discover,
Facebook and other agents create a myth of choice which valorizes the popular while making
others invisible. Ultimately the processes of categorization done by Discover are as influential
as the content they carry. Therefore we argue that the analytical focus should be directed not
only on issues of content moderation but also, as we illustrate in our research,
on form moderation as well. Our findings on Discover reveal an easy-to-obtain taste of the
internet that encourages and demands spending to fully participate in contemporary informational
capitalism. Facebook works to colonize an untapped market with Discover by giving free,
albeit redacted, samples of the internet. We found Facebook, we found Discover's mechanisms
of redaction to be a profit-motivated constraint that both frustrates and teases.
And although Discover provides extremely limited benefits of internet connection for free,
it nonetheless enforces uneven access. We find that Facebook Discover, rather than being a
philanthropic endeavor, operates more akin to the logics of sachet marketing. Discover effectively
redesigns, packages, and sells internet access in smaller forms, like digital sachets. This leads
cashflow-constrained consumers to make frequent purchases as opposed to more cost-efficient bulk
alternatives. The last digital frontier market is reached through these digital sachets. We argue
that this profit driven logic of redaction and form moderation further extracts from precarious
consumers by colonizing new markets rather than ameliorating structural inequality.
Discover's configuration of purposefully limited access situates the Philippines as a consumer that
is always craving for more, enabling facebook and other agents to turn the Philippines into their
market, testbed, and backroom. Rather than viewing the forays of large tech companies into the Global South
as philanthropic acts, we argue that these ventures should be critiqued and regulated. At a
smaller scale, we urge engineers and technologists implicated in technology companies' colonizing
actions to mobilize in solidarity with those affected by the products they design and create,
and hold their employers accountable for the ethical standards that they claim to follow.
Thank you for listening to our talk and we hope you'll read our paper!