The social media giant Facebook announced today Sunday that it has partnered with the Central Council for Secondary Education in India known as "CBSE", which is a government body overseeing education in private and public schools in the country, to launch an accredited curriculum on safety Digital, online luxury, and augmented reality for students and teachers in the country.
Facebook and the Central Education Council aim to prepare high school students for current and emerging jobs, help them develop skills to surf the Internet safely, make "informed choices", and think about their mental health.
Facebook said that it will provide this training in different stages, as in the first stage more than 10,000 teachers will be trained, while in the second they will train 30,000 students.
The 3-week training will cover augmented reality technologies, the basics of nascent technology, and ways to use Facebook's Spark AR Studio to create augmented reality experiences.
This initiative is considered a new claw that Facebook will instill in the Indian market to tighten its control over the major market after China in the Internet.
From America’s Hell to the Heaven of India
Facebook has faced increasing pressure in recent years in the United States, from the Cambridge Analytica incident to the end of its growing boycott campaign because of its stance on hate publications after the murder of George Floyd, through a stormy congressional hearing on the back of his Libera digital currency project And the successive cases brought against him in the European Union.
Facebook finds itself facing these successive crises having to search for a strong incubator for its expansion project, which enables it to achieve its ambitions to control a large market, but it is still young in terms of the laws regulating the Internet and communications sector.
And Facebook is looking for a country to trade Russia and China in terms of the number of users with a weak regulatory environment or strong allies within it, which he found in India.
India is home to the largest Facebook user base on the planet, with hundreds of millions of people using its digital services. Facebook now wants to gain a stronger foothold in the country as more people enter the Internet.
But with more than 300 million Facebook users and 400 million WhatsApp users in India, what does the social media giant want? The answer is the next billion users, those who use the Internet for the first time in India's developing economy.
In 2015, Facebook introduced a program called Free Basics, which aims to provide some applications for free to users by partnering with some network providers.
The company was driven by making Facebook a gateway to the internet for these first-time users, with the company controlling content that people could access for free. This was the ability to shape the idea of the global web for these users, while Facebook also made the brand the most prominent in their online experience.
So, when they graduate to the broader Internet, Facebook will become a major part of how they browse the digital world.
However, in 2016, India banned the FreeBasix project, because it violated the country's net internet neutrality rules, which required that all online content be treated equally by service providers.
With the disappearance of Free Basics, the social networking giant has searched for other ways to make friends with new internet users in India.
In 2017, Facebook launched a program for a Wi-Fi network in India called Express Wifi, which allows stores to provide Internet access to shoppers via hotspots at a nominal price.
500 local retailers and more than 10,000 contact points across India are currently participating in this network. But it is not clear how many people use these points.
In addition, Facebook-owned WhatsApp introduced the online payment service in the same year, a move that it was unable to take recently in Brazil, as the Brazilian central bank suspended WhatsApp projects to expand this service to countries other than India.
Facebook, Maharaja and Prime Minister meet
Facebook has partnered with Reliance Jio, the Indian telecom giant, investing $ 5.7 billion to launch Digital Udaan, the “largest digital literacy program ever” for first time internet users in India, the largest market for Facebook by number Users.
Joe was founded more than 3 years ago by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, and led a campaign to sell mobile data at affordable prices in the country, and as a result, India has the cheapest data plans worldwide, and Reliance Go The largest telecom provider in the country with over 370 million subscribers.
While Joe has brilliantly implemented an ambitious growth strategy in India, its technical offerings were not up to standard, and its smartphones were not sold well. Projects designed for India, such as the mapping service, an Indian voice assistant and a virtual reality headset, have even failed in projects such as telemedicine and an AI video call assistant.
But a partner who has the ability to build capable and desirable technologies, such as Facebook, can certainly help turn these projects into successes, and if you consider an atmosphere entering other markets outside India, Facebook support can make negotiations easier.
Maharaja Mukesh Ambani is not the only friend of Facebook in India, there is also the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government recently enacted laws restricting the control of social media and asking them to monitor the content it publishes.
Under the new system, websites must proactively filter illegal content, in addition to granting powers to access any communications required within the framework of law enforcement, and enabling the authorities to track messages to their senders. If companies do not comply, they will be responsible for the users ’behavior. This is what was stated in the original proposal, while the final draft was kept secret.
Of course it goes without saying that this law rips all forms of privacy and since Facebook strengthens its site in India it will respond in one way or another to these laws that give greater authority to the Modi party.
This is not only what Facebook and Moody have in common, but perhaps they have recently combined a bigger goal of getting rid of the common enemy, China, which is its famous Tik Tok application.
The enemy of China is a friend of India
India is close to 1.39 billion people with China 1.44 in population, but it has diverged from it in politics and digital superiority, especially in recent weeks as relations between the two countries witnessed border tensions that led to military clashes between the two parties.
In the wake of these tensions, India has asked the Apple and Google stores to delete all Chinese applications, including the famous tik-tok app, the most powerful rival of Facebook in India.
This dangerous development opened the way for Facebook to further expand into the Indian market, and at the beginning of July it appointed 3 executives at once in its India branch in the areas of technology, communications and media.
And with partners like the owner of India’s most powerful telecom company, its richest man, common interests and a clear enemy, Facebook may find itself in India more than its home country, the United States.