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Zuckerberg to visit India on October 28, hold Townhall Q&A
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coming to India to host a Townhall Q&A at IIT-Delhi on October 28, the young billionaire said in a post.
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- The visit comes close 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.
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- 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."
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- He has 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,” he wrote.
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- In September, 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,” Zuckerberg had said.
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- "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. 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,” he said.
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- 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 plans triggered serious backlash.
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- Facebook has been aggressively trying to market Internet.org/ Free Basics in India.