Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was at IIT Delhi for his first ever Townhall Q&A in India.
The event generated a lot of buzz as earlier this year, Zuckerberg and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had done a successful Q&A Townhall at the company’s headquarters in the US.
Just a day before the big Zuckerberg Townhall, Jai Mani, the lead product manager of Xiaomi India, spoke with IIT students as well. He even tweeted that he was glad he spoke a day before Zuckerberg because the latter’s would be a tough act to follow.
While the IITs are known to encourage young leaders from the technology world to come and speak to its students, getting Mark Zuckerberg to do a Townhall was a grand achievement.
This was supposed to be a cracker of an event.
Hit and Miss Affair
But, Zuckerberg’s body language was very different to a year ago when he came to India to launch his pet project, Internet.org. He was cautious and chose his words after a lot of thought.
Though there were thousands of questions sent by people for his Townhall, only 11 were addressed at the event. They had been carefully selected to keep him at ease.
Zuckerberg did try to address the debate on net neutrality, which saw Internet.org take a lot of flak in India this year. But the facts he stated were from Facebook’s own internal survey, which, of course, stands to benefit from a positive perception of the project.
The Walled Garden
The event itself seemed like a brand building exercise for Internet.org.
Most of the people talking about Internet.org are people who already have access to the internet. The ones who don’t, have nothing to say about it.
Mark Zuckerberg
While trying to provide Internet access to all is a noble cause for sure, walled gardens like Internet.org didn’t exist when urban India got access. So why provide a walled garden to those who don’t have access right now?
If Facebook is working for the greater good, then it can invest in building infrastructure to give people access to all of the Internet instead of just a part of it. Internet.org could have been like any other CSR project undertaken by Facebook like making schools in Africa.
Trial Run Townhall
Zuckerberg wanted to test the waters, which explains the small audience size and the hint that next year’s Townhall will need a stadium.
The question asked at the start of the Townhall still remains unanswered: Why so much interest in India? Zuckerberg resorted to statistics and figures and appealed to the Indian sentiment when he said that to get everyone around the world on the Internet, India will play a major role.
But despite this explanation, the Townhall remained an image exercise for Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Zuckerberg did, however, show some real emotion when he spoke of his visit to the Taj Mahal.
And I do look forward to seeing how Facebook will resolve the Candy Crush request mess for now.
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