This article written by our CEO, Tarek Kassar, and originally published today on interactiveME.com.
I wanted to drop my comment on the debate that is happening today on- and off-Facebook in regards to the effectiveness of boycotting facebook. The call to boycot facebook is in response to the fact that Facebook repeatedly removed 3 Palestinian Intifada pages and the day of effect was supposed to be today, April 10th.
Well, it’s quite obvious that Mark Zuckerberg and his friends have done a nasty job by continuously removing any Intifada page attracting friends. From his perspective, I believe he acted clever because of the Israeli lobby. He is basically running the 3rd largest country in the world and acting as a President with a western agenda. But do you think it’s clever to boycott Facebook for a day and make a difference?
Let’s be realistic, fact-based, and rational.
According to the latest Facebook MENA statistics report we wrote, we were around 21,000,000 out of 500,000,000 facebook users. This means that if the whole Arab world, every Arab Facebook user, decided to boycott Facebook, Facebook would only lose 4.5 percent of its user-base. To put things into perspectives, Facebook is growing 5 times more than this percentage annually. So, if you leave the Facebook world, somebody else is filling your place anyway.
For those who were campaigning to boycott Facebook (like 1 2 3), I don’t think it made any significant impact on the Arab Facebook users today nor on Mark Zuckerbery.
So “WE” missed the call and not “Mark Zuckerberg”.



