Facebook as a player in international relations. A study of Internet.org and its project to connect the world

This article takes a detailed look at Facebook’s Internet.org project, which has aimed to connect developing countries to the internet. The project is a real laboratory for identifying the role that the major digital platforms intend to play in international relations. Following on from work in international political economy, the article looks at how, through Internet.org, Facebook has sought to exploit the emerging markets of the global South for its own benefit, and how, by doing so, it has set itself up as a player capable of solving their socio-economic development problems. The article shows how, by investing in this field, the company has promoted a very specific vision of what development should be, in line with its own interests – a vision that the company has endeavoured to share on a global scale, through a full-blown diplomatic offensive. For studying the strategy pursued by Facebook within this framework and the discourse legitimizing it, this article draws on an abundant corpus of documents produced by the company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.