this news via a post on his Facebook page. This follows on the heels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the Facebook HQ, where he took part in a similar Q&A session just a month ago.
In
the post, Zuckerberg noted that over 130 million people in India use Facebook,
and that he's looking forward to hearing from "one of our most active and
engaged communities." He's also asked people to leave questions for the
session, directly on the Facebook post, so if you want to know something you
can head over and ask; or you could 'like' posts to vote for questions already
being asked. Funnily enough, the most up-voted question at this point is one
that's asking Facebook to delete the game Candy Crush.
Last
month in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg hosted PM Modi for a Townhall Q&A session.
"India is personally very important to the history of our company here.
This is a story that I have not told publicly and very few people know,"
he said at the Facebook headquarters on September 27. "Early on in our
history, before things were really going well and we had hit a tough patch, and
a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook and thought we should sell the
company," said Zuckerberg. "I went and saw one of my mentors, Steve
Jobs, and he told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed is the
mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India
early in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of
the future to be."
"So
I went and I travelled for almost a month and seeing the people, seeing how
people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world
could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect, reinforced for me the
importance of what we were doing," said Zuckerberg. "And that is
something I have always remembered over the last ten years as we built
Facebook."
This
visit also comes right after the announcement of Free Basics, the rebranded
version of the controversial
Internet.org program. India has, in some ways, become a test-bed for
the service, which has raised a number of questions around net neutrality. In India,
Internet.org arrived at the same time as a growing debate around Internet
regulation, and moves by telcos to introduce zero
ratings planstriggered serious backlash.
Internet.org
also got caught up in this, and has been the centre of a lot of controversy in
India since then. Facebook has been aggressively trying to market Internet.org/
Free Basics in India, with advertising, SMS, and Facebook-based campaigns, and
of course, meetings with political leaders. This upcoming visit by Zuckerberg
is looks to be an extension of this same charm offensive.
Written with inputs from PTI.
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