Facebook ‘2G Tuesdays’: Company to slow down internet connections so that employees can simulate the developing world

Site hopes that it can develop new technologies that allow the app to speed up on slow connections

US chairman and chief executive of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg walks on stage to announce the Internet.org Innovation Challenge in India in New Delhi on October 9, 2014 (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images)

Facebook is to launch a 2G Tuesdays initiative, which will hugely slow down their internet connections so that they can see what it’s like to use the app in emerging markets.

The company is making a huge attempt to push into the developing world, introducing new apps and features tailored towards emerging markets. But many of the people making those apps are on entirely different connections — which tend to be much faster than those of the people that will eventually use them.

To help bridge the “empathy gap” between those two groups, Facebook is launching an opt-in initiative called 2G Tuesdays, reports Business Insider. That will allow people to intentionally slow their internet down to 2G speeds — rather than the 3G or 4G ones that most developers will have access to.

When Facebook employees log into the app on Tuesday mornings, they’ll see a prompt at the top of their News Feed. That will ask them whether they want to be part of the programme for the next hour, slowing down their connection.

"For that next hour, their experience on Facebook will be very much like the experience that millions of people around the world have on Facebook on a 2G connection," Facebook engineering director Tom Alison told Business Insider. "They're going to see the places that we need to improve our product, but they're also going to see the places where we have made a lot of progress."

Facebook hopes that the experience will lead people to develop new technologies to speed up the experience on slow connections. It has already highlighted some of those technologies, like a system that allows the app to work out how fast a users’ internet connection is and then show News Feed stories that account for that — avoiding videos if a connection is slow, for instance.