What's In The Stars For Facebook?

Facebook india under Ajit Mohan has two new bets for the future: social videos and social commerce. But it has got to tackle two things first: regulation and a rival that goes by the name TikTok.

- Arnika Thakur And Abhik Sen

Many thought Ajit Mohan was brave when he took the helm at Facebook India in January 2019. On the outside the transition looked natural. In his previous gig as the CEO of Hotstar, he had seen stupendous success. He had launched the video-on-demand service for Star India in 2015 and steered it to great heights. Six months before he quit to join Facebook, Hotstar had racked up 150 million monthly active users. It was time he moved on in search of new shores and new quests. But why Facebook? The trappings that come with the job are not easy to pass on. In prestige, captaining the biggest social media company of our times in its largest market in terms of users, it is right up there.

Facebook was going through perhaps the stormiest phase in its entire history then. It began in March 2018, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal—which involved the data analytics firm harvesting personal information of more than 80 million Facebook users. A month later, Mark Zuckerberg, its 35-year-old billionaire founder, was summoned by the U.S. Senate to testify on whether Cambridge Analytica used the data to influence U.S. voters in the presidential election. In September, another data breach occurred; this time the compromised numbered about 50 million, including Indians.

In India, WhatsApp Pay, a payment feature on its cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service, was stuck over data localization rules (it has since been granted regulatory approval for a phased roll-out). The company was pulled up over incidents of lynching allegedly incited by fake news on WhatsApp. And while all this was playing out in 2018, there was no one to watch over the India business for about a year. Umang Bedi had left by 2017-end after about 15 months at the helm; he later joined news aggregator Dailyhunt.