Deep in the difficult-to-traverse Thar desert, connectivity is a precious rarity. More than 8,000 miles away in Sindh, Pakistan, WhatsApp is a critical tool of commerce, especially for poverty-stricken rural villages that rely on very thin margins from livestock sales. “We have a woman who has cancer and we had to wait all day to see when we could speak to her and receive her medical documents.” “We couldn’t do our jobs to communicate with asylum seekers or professionals on the ground,” said Charlene D’Cruz, an immigration attorney leading efforts to provide pro bono legal assistance to asylum-seekers. The cacophony of ringtones that usually echo throughout the sprawling urban encampment in Matamoros went silent as hundreds of migrants from Central America and the Caribbean, and the aid workers helping them, scrambled to contact immigration lawyers and medical services located on the other side of the US-Mexico border without being able to use WhatsApp. For hundreds of millions of people outside Matamoros, WhatsApp is much more than a messaging platform: it is their main avenue for generating income and seeking government and emergency services where there is at least limited, free internet connection and where mobile phone services have yet to arrive or remains prohibitively expensive.īut when Facebook’s servers crashed on 4 October, it became clear that those bright spots hid grave pitfalls. The lengthy queues of people waiting to charge their phones snaked out of every restaurant and convenience store, testament to the indispensable role of social media in a refugee camp. There, WhatsApp became a portal for people trapped in the camp to access lifesaving medical care and legal aid. I spent two months in Matamoros, Mexico, organising Project Lifeline’s telemedicine and remote legal assistance project for Central American asylum-seekers stranded in a sprawling border encampment by the migrant protection protocols.
In 2019, amid heated debates in the west concerning the proliferation of disinformation and mental health issues stemming from social media, I witnessed a more hopeful side of Facebook’s promise to connect the world.
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