Millions of Nigerians using Facebook don't realise they're on the internet!

Potentially millions of Facebook users don’t realise they are on the internet when they use the site.

New research by the website Quartz goes some way to confirming a three-year-old study that showed people in south-east Asia and Nigeria were more likely to claim to be Facebook-users than internet-users.

“It seemed that in their minds, the internet did not exist; only Facebook.”

Quartz tried to replicate the phenomenon of Facebook members in emerging market countries not associating the site with the internet by commissioning surveys in Nigeria and Indonesia.

The research suggested 11% of Indonesians and 9% of Nigerians say they are active on Facebook, but don’t use the internet.

Facebook, which has close to 2billion members, has committed itself to extending internet access to the around 60 per cent of the world’s population currently cut off.

But does the disassociation of the internet and Facebook in some people’s minds mean that in the future, governments and companies will have to reach out via one site rather, and play by their rules, rather than use the open web?

But a closer look at the data (available in full here) shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook users said they do not use the internet. These are largely young people; the median age of respondents with this combination of answers is 25 in Indonesia and 22 in Nigeria.

It would be silly to extrapolate this to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. But the survey does provide replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya. Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions.

The effects of the misconception also are visible in the survey results. When respondents where asked whether they follow links out of Facebook. In both countries, more than half of those who don’t know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook, compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook and the internet.

[Source]