With 19-million of us using Facebook regularly, the platform is South Africa's most powerful media outstripping the old print giants, all online products and very soon taking on television.
Yet, trying to find out how safe South Africans are from the manipulation of data that is besetting the blue platform, which has revolutionised the meaning of "like" and "share" and opened up unimagined vistas of communications and commerce, is an almost impossible task.
Facebook is having a tough year after revelations that the political research and analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly accessed the data of tens of millions of Facebook members.
In South Africa, those impacted number about 96,000 people after 13 people downloaded the "YourDigitalLife" app which then collected the data of networks of friends of those people. Yet, Facebook will not provide details of the accounts, or even their geographies, to assess the damage. Granted, Cambridge Analytica used the information to try to swing elections primarily in the U.S., but the story is a cautionary tale of how Facebook can be used to mess with your mind and to upend democratic processes.
How safe is your Facebook page from disinformation and manipulation? You will never know because the platform has thrown a dragnet around sharing information about how it is used in South Africa and the rest of the continent.
The Silicon Valley giant recently opened up its standards processes to public scrutiny...but it will not specifically answer questions about its processes in South Africa or the rest of Africa.
The company will reveal details about developer circles it sponsors and it will share information about how small and medium-sized businesses are using its Pages service to grow, but it will not reveal to what extent Facebook is a source of news to South Africans or to what extent it is becoming a source of political campaigning by party-political forces. This can be gauged by how much political advertising the site is carrying, but Facebook is a black hole when it comes to revealing who is advertising and what they are trying to "sell" us.
A company spokesperson said: "It would be inappropriate for us to comment or share information about advertising spends." The company has a public policy team, which oversees how Facebook is used in elections. But how it vets information on the platform to ensure that it does not corrupt into disinformation is an opaque process at best.
The Silicon Valley giant recently opened up its standards processes to public scrutiny when it made public how it goes about assessing controversial material but it will not specifically answer questions about its processes in South Africa or the rest of Africa.
Facebook is huge across the continent. In Nigeria, there are 24-million total monthly active users and in Kenya there are 8.5-million people firing up the world's foremost sharing platform. All Facebook will say is this: "Africa is important to Facebook. With more than a billion people there is strong business momentum and opportunity in many countries across the continent."
The company, which reported stellar results last week despite the data scandal, sees Africa as an emerging market of great potential because economies are growing and because business usage is high.
The company, which reported stellar results last week despite the data scandal, sees Africa as an emerging market of great potential because economies are growing and because business usage is high. In addition, the population curve on the continent may help it buck the trend of Facebook's user cohort getting older and older.
A Facebook spokesperson told HuffPost SA: "The future of Africa is young (Africa has more people aged under 20 than anywhere else in the world). One of our key roles across the continent is supporting and investing in young and diverse creative talent".
It hosts 27 developer circles with 27,000 members in cities like Johannesburg, Accra, Lagos, Kinshasa and Nairobi. The tech startups coming out of these circles are often exciting and innovative. But the story of the data breach by Cambridge Analytica raises a caution that all of us who fire up the blue platform need to be aware of: the products being developed get access to our data. That is the "sell" or what attracts the developers to Facebook and this provides the platform with the content it needs to keep us coming back for more for more minutes per day.
The high numbers of users, in turn, create massive political markets that dark forces are conniving to manipulate. Facebook's only just beginning to grasp the nettle as the hearings in Congress attended by CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed. Last week Zuckerberg again sought to dampen down worries among users about the safety of our data.
But, here, at the southern tip of Africa, it's still the old opaque Facebook culture that determines what you may and may not know about how your data is being used and how the algorithm chooses what you see and do not see.