Interesting:

«A sizeable portion of the nearly 100 million users who have come online through Internet.org live in Myanmar, where Facebook partnered with local telco Myanma Posts and Telecommunications for the program in mid-2016. The social network went on to serve as an accelerant to violence and ethnic cleansing-related hate speech. Cost-free access to Facebook’s services has seen Facebook’s own user base in the country skyrocket from two million in 2014 to 30 million last year. (Users who sign up for Internet.org are required to sign up for Facebook first, and Free Basics works by not counting Facebook use against a limited data plan; therefore, if users do most browsing through Facebook, they can use the “internet” essentially for free.)

But by August, the Free Basics program, which is part of the Internet.org initiative, abruptly ended in the nation, users say; using Facebook was no longer free of cost on a data plan. “It all just stopped working one day,” May, a Yangon-based college professor told The Outline. Facebook’s free internet service, she said, was immensely popular in her city.

Myanmar is not the only place where Free Basics has quietly ended. The program has been abruptly called off in more than half a dozen nations and territories in the recent months….»

Source: https://theoutline.com/post/4383/facebook-quietly-ended-free-basics-in-myanmar-and-other-countries