Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions on the social network Tuesday about an array of topics from the company s real name policy to working out.Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, physicist Stephen Hawking and The Huffington Post editor-in-chief Ariana Huffington also participated in the online discussion.Here s a recap of some of the topics Zuckerberg covered in the Q&A:
Hi Mark, you made a tool to let everyone put rainbow flags over their profile pictures, but you also insist on having people use their real names on Facebook. Many people in the trans community consider this discriminatory and even argue it puts their lives at risk. Are you going to end the practice?
This is an important question. Real names are an important part of how our community works for a couple of reasons.First, 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. There are plenty of cases — for example, a woman leaving an abusive relationship and trying to avoid her violent ex-husband — where preventing the ex-husband from creating profiles with fake names and harassing her is important. As long as he s using his real name, she can easily block him.Second, 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.
That said, there is some confusion about what our policy actually is. Real name does not mean your 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. 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 both keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community.
I would like to know a unified theory of gravity and the other forces. Which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why? That s a pretty good one! I m most interested in questions about people. What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work and how we can empower humans to learn a million times more? I m also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about. I bet there is.
