Facebook obeys the law everywhere it is enforced. Some laws are better than than others.
Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like
Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.
The global digital advertising market is some 240BN and expected to grow to like 500BN by 2024, 550M is an incredibly tiny portion of their overall earnings from digital advertisements. Google's share of that 550M, for instance, would be less than 1% of its revenue from digital ads in 2019. That's not a lot of money for either of those companies.
200 million per year is a lot of money for anyone. Also if the global ad market doubles, wouldn't facebook capture a lot of that? Also how much more is vietnam growing than other countries?
There is no company in the world that will ignore a market offering $1 million daily revenue, more especially in advertising where cost to platform owners like Google and Fb is marginal.
Either reason is a poor excuse to continue to provide service in any country that uses political pressure to modify content.
FB and anyone else requested to remove politically motivated content should leave the country until that practice is stopped, and only resume service as long as no requests are made.
I know money and network effects will win out anyway but that's what I believe will pressure these governments to relent.
Facebook makes essentially 0 profit in poor countries like Vietnam. Their presence there is a more general wanting to be everywhereand have everyone on board to support their users and advertisers in wealthy nations.