I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year.
They did certainly care about the growth of daily active users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
A company as big as Facebook is going to have different groups with different objectives that often do not see eye to eye or even know about each other. A company as profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are motivated by things other than profits.
There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to get as many users as possible in developing markets. These markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook will never disclose its cost per user but in general online ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the most optimistic development projections will not make them profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from Myanmar is negligible.
Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally get the sense that people there (especially at the top) have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their product makes the world a better place (I disagree with this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that these the project tasked with increasing users in developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than business.
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They did certainly care about the growth of daily active users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
User growth and profits are not the same thing.
A company as big as Facebook is going to have different groups with different objectives that often do not see eye to eye or even know about each other. A company as profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are motivated by things other than profits.
There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to get as many users as possible in developing markets. These markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook will never disclose its cost per user but in general online ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the most optimistic development projections will not make them profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from Myanmar is negligible.
Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally get the sense that people there (especially at the top) have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their product makes the world a better place (I disagree with this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that these the project tasked with increasing users in developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than business.