Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks Internet.org, AI, VR and real name policies

Question and answer session pulled in life, the universe and everything

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has held a question and answer session with the social site's users, discussing everything from privacy and real name policies to the controversial Internet.org project.

The session pulled in questions from people including Stephen Hawking and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the latter of whom asked Zuckerberg about his health routine.

Zuckerberg spoke about the next decade at Facebook and his plans for connecting people and improving the social networking experience.

He said that he hopes to "improve how the world connects" through increased internet reach and expanded technology.

For the next hour Ill be here answering your questions on Facebook. Our Townhall Q&As are an important way for me to...

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, June 30, 2015

"We're working on spreading internet access around the world through Internet.org. Today, almost two thirds of the world has no internet access," he said.

"In the next 10 years, Internet.org has the potential to help connect hundreds of millions or billions of people who do not have access to the internet today.

"If we can connect the four billion people in the world who are unconnected, we can potentially raise 400 million people out of poverty. That's perhaps one of the greatest things we can do in the world."

Artificial intelligence and virtual reality, both industries that Facebook has bought its way into, are also on the 10-year agenda, and Zuckerberg said that more intelligent services are well within reach.

"If we had computers that could understand the meaning of the posts in News Feed and show you more things you're interested in, that would be pretty amazing," he said.

"Similarly, if we could build computers that could understand what's in an image and could tell a blind person who otherwise couldn't see that image, that would be pretty amazing as well. This is all within our reach and I hope we can deliver it in the next 10 years."

More controversial topics were also discussed, such as Facebook's insistence on subscribers using their real names.

"It helps keep people safe. We know that people are much less likely to try to act abusively towards other members of our community when they're using their real names," Zuckerberg said.

"Real names help make the service easier to use. People use Facebook to look up friends and people they meet all the time. This is easy because you can just type their name into search and find them. This becomes much harder if people don't use their real names."

Zuckerberg added that some confusion exists about the policy, explaining that people can use a nickname, and that "real name" does not necessarily mean "legal name".

"Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you. If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that," he said.

"In this way, we should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community.

"We are working on better and more ways for people to show us what their real name is so we can keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community."