I may be overly cynical here but my understanding is:
Facebook tried to build a walled garden development platform on top of TCP/IP, bundle it with free low-bandwidth internetnecessities (consisting of Facebook and several other deliberately non-Google properties) and ram it dowm the throats of a billion impoverished and technologicly unfamiliar new internet users of India.
At that time in 2013[0], FB market cap was $100B, GOOG was $282B. FB had 1.1B users with ARPU of $1.63, GOOG had 1.3B users with ARPU of $10.09. Looking avoid a market correction, FB aimed to add 1B new users from India and simultaneously prevent them from becoming new Google users and disguised the scheme as philanthropy. It didn't work.
FB was then forced to moved fast and break: data access control policies, respect for their users, expectation of privacy, and lots of pesky regulations. By distributing user data for free as an investment in the future, then buying the competition to control the demand, FB cemented their position as a gatekeeper of the online commons and dictator of social media.
Insights gained from this freely available, or loosely guarded user data helped explode demand for the user manipulation as a service offering FB had newly monopolized.
Gloves now off, FB leveraged this position and acheived hockey stick profit growth after just one US congressional election season, a midterm year at that.
