Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have a Facebook Live discussion with President Obama on Friday. The discussion is part of the conference on tech in emerging markets. As per an announcement from the White House, Obama will talk with the audience of entrepreneurs from 170 countries at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Palo Alto, California.
Facebook CEO won’t take audience questions
As of now, the format of the Facebook Live discussion is still unclear. Since Zuckerberg has not requested that users give their questions for the President, the discussion can be expected to be a pre-planned one but this could take the fun away from Facebook Live as audience participation is an important part of it.
This will not be the first discussion between Obama and Zuckerberg. In 2011, Obama visited Facebook’s HQ for a town hall-style meeting with Zuckerberg. This time, the audience won’t be limited to employees but will have a larger user base of up to 1.65 billion. This high-profile event will give the much-needed boost to Facebook’s live-streaming feature, which the company is aggressively promoting with help from celebs and media firms.
In April, Facebook updated the feature to make it easier for users to interact with, discover and share videos. A recent report claimed that the social networking giant is paying over $50 million to news outlets such as BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and CNN to come up with more live video content.
Obama to talk business at summit
This is GES’ seventh year since its inception in 2009. The White House claims that with GES it has reached about 17,000 people – mostly Muslims — in emerging markets. Obama uses the summit to popularize his foreign policy legacy as his term draws closer to the end on Jan. 20, 2017.
The idea of the summit came from a speech Obama delivered in Cairo in 2009. During this speech, the U.S. President signaled that he wanted to repair the relationship with the Muslim world and refurbish U.S. policy on the Middle East.
On Friday, Obama will talk about connecting investors and Silicon Valley’s brightest minds with young talent globally, says Reuters. The President won’t be addressing concerns about the use of social media platforms by extremists.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told reporters, “We believe the United States needs to have affirmative values that we are promoting around the world, in addition to the efforts we do to counter terrorism… We wanted to discuss not just what we’re against, but what we’re for.”
