This is all very AOL 1990's sounding. The failure in the logic is that FB is the gateway drug. As people clicks links in FB and discover other resources that are valuable they become users of those services and spread beyond FB only usage.
To me this raises an interesting philosophical question - is Facebook actually separate to the internet? It uses the underlying transport mechanisms of the net, sure, but that's not really what we mean when we say the internet. When my mother says she's using the internet she doesn't mean she's generating HTTP GET requests to query servers and render the resulting HTML. She means she's using a browser to read a page and then clicking on a link to get another page. Facebook certainly isn't the world wide web or email, which is what most people mean when they say "internet". If what you're doing is in an largely separate, walled-off area, that you mostly access with an app rather than a browser, is that really what we mean when we say the internet?
I'd need to think about it more, but I imagine there's quite a compelling argument that using Facebook is not using the internet for any non-technical definition of 'the internet'.
For some people, "the Internet" is Facebook and maybe Netflix. That's it. They may not even understand that there's more out there, or what a web page even is. Facebook and Netflix are certainly closer to applications than they are websites. I imagine the Internet to them is an extension of the apps they use on their phone.
I would even go so far as to say for some people, Google is the only way they know of to find things. Which to me is more scary, since Google in a sense can control what X% of the population sees as the users aren't even aware of another means of accessing blocked content.
Totally agree. I watched a family member Google "budget rental cars" to get to budget.com. Seriously. She wasn't searching, she needed customer service in order to keep a car a few extra days.
To her, Google is the "internet" (web, actually, but you know what I mean in this context).