Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BBC Economics Editor Kamal Ahmed: Mark Zuckerberg says there are threats to "common understanding" 
 
 Mark Zuckerberg has revealed deep-seated concerns that the tide is turning against globalisation. 
 
 In an interview with the BBC, the Facebook founder said that fake news, polarised views and "filter bubbles" were damaging "common understanding". 
 
 He said people had been left behind by global growth, sparking demands to "withdraw" from the "connected world". 
 
 In a call to action, he said people must not "sit around and be upset", but act to build "social infrastructures". 
 
 "When I started Facebook, the mission of connecting the world was not controversial," he told me. 
 
 "It was as if it was a default assumption that people had; every year the world got more connected and that seems like the direction things were heading in. 
 
 "Now that vision is becoming more controversial." 
 
 Losing hope 
 
 He told the BBC: "There are people around the world that feel left behind by globalisation and the rapid changes that have happened, and there are movements as a result to withdraw from some of that global connection." 
 
 Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption Anti-globalisation protests, such as this one in the Philippines, have broken out across the world. 
 
 Mr Zuckerberg's interview comes alongside the publication of a 5,500-word letter he has written about the future of Facebook and the global economy. 
 
 In it Mr Zuckerberg quotes Abraham Lincoln who spoke of acting "in concert", and talks about "spiritual needs", civic engagement and says that many people have "lost hope for the future". 
 
 "For a couple of decades, may be longer, people have really sold this idea that as the world comes together everything is going to get better," he said. 
 
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 Zuckerberg's manifesto on Facebook and the future 
 
 Read highlights from the interview with Facebook's founder 
 
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 "I think the reality is that over the long term that will be true, and there are pieces of infrastructure that we can build to make sure that a global community works for everyone. 
 
 "But I do think there are some ways in which this idea of globalisation didn't take into account some of the challenges it was going to create for people, and now I think some of what you see is a reaction to that. 
 
 "If people are asking the question, is the direction for humanity to come together more or not? I think that answer is clearly yes. 
 
 "But we have to make sure the global community works for everyone. It is not just automatically going to happen. 
 
 "All these different kinds of institutions, whether they are governments, or non-profits, or companies, need to do their part in building this infrastructure to empower people so that it creates opportunities for everyone, not just some people. 
 
 "If you are upset about the direction things are going in, I hope you don't just sit around and be upset, but you feel urgent about building the long term infrastructure that needs to get built," Mr Zuckerberg said. 
 
 Global challenges 
 
 I asked him whether he felt President Trump agreed with his view that "bringing people together" and "connecting the world" would lead to greater progress. 
 
 Mr Zuckerberg did not, famously, attend the round-table of technology leaders hosted by the new president. 
 
 "I don't think I am going to speak to that directly," he answered carefully. "You can talk to him, you can look at what he has said to get a sense of that. 
 
 "The thing that I will say is that a lot of folks will look at this through the lens of one or two events, and I really do think this is a broader trend. 
 
 "I have been talking about this for a long time, since before recent elections both across Europe and Asia and the US. 
 
 "A lot of today's biggest opportunities will come from bringing people together - whether that is spreading prosperity or freedom, or accelerating science, or promoting peace and understanding." 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The charitable foundation set up by Mr Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan is giving billions of dollars to charity. 
 
 Mr Zuckerberg said: "A lot of challenges we face today are also entirely global - fighting climate change or ending terrorism, or ending pandemics, or when a civil war in one country leads to a refugee crisis across different continents. 
 
 "These are inherently global things and require a different level of infrastructure than we've had historically." 
 
 Political ambitions? 
 
 Would you like to meet President Trump? I asked. 
 
 "I would like that not be the focus of this. I don't really have much comment on that. It somewhat detracts from the focus of what we are trying to do here." 
 
 There has been speculation that Mr Zuckerberg could be contemplating a political career, and even suggestions that he will run for US president in 2020 - rumours he has flatly denied. 
 
 I said the political tone of the manifesto would do little to dampen speculation about where he sees himself longer term. 
 
 Could he imagine himself going into politics? "I am not doing that now, it's not the plan," he said. "The thing I really care about is connecting the world." 
 
 Facebook has been attacked for not doing enough to tackle "fake news" - untrue stories which claimed, for example, that the Pope backed Mr Trump - which have appeared prominently on its news feeds. 
 
 In Germany, there has been controversy after a Green MP was quoted in a Facebook post defending an asylum seeker from Afghanistan who had raped and murdered a German student. 
 
 The MP, Renate Kuenast, had never said what was attributed to her by a right-wing extremist organisation. 
 
 Ms Kuenast said she found it hard to accept that "Zuckerberg earns billions, shows off with all his charitable donations, and at the same time allows Facebook to become a tool of extremists". 
 
 Mr Zuckerberg said he understood the importance of tackling fake news. 
 
 Freedom of opinion 
 
 "Accuracy of information is very important," he said in the 5,500-word letter, published on Thursday. "We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook. 
 
 "We've made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. 
 
 "We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion." 
 
 But Mr Zuckerberg added: "In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong. 
 
 "Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy." 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images 
 
 He told me that "polarisation and sensationalism" also undermined "common understanding". 
 
 And he admitted that social media - which deals in short, often aggressive, messages - had been part of the problem. 
 
 "In some places [it] could over simplify important and complex topics and may push us to have over simplified opinions of them," Mr Zuckerberg said. 
 
 "And I think it is our responsibility to amplify the good effects and mitigate the negative ones so we can create a community that has a common understanding 
 
 "There is a lot of research that shows we have the best discourse when we connect as whole people rather than just opinions. 
 
 "If I get to know you on the values that we have in common or even the interests that we share it is a lot easier to have a debate about something that we disagree about productively than if we just meet and go head to head on something without understanding our common humanity." 
 
 'Setting an example' 
 
 Some may argue there is a question of legitimacy here, that no one voted for Mark Zuckerberg and question his right to outline - and attempt to execute - a vision of the world. 
 
 And what about those controversies over taxes paid, or privacy, or vast profits in an age when inequality is as much a factor behind the present dim view of many in the political and business establishment as any perceived failures of globalisation. 
 
 "There are a lot of areas that I know we need to improve and I appreciate the criticism and feedback and hope we can continue to do better on them," Mr Zuckerberg said, pointing out that he is donating 99% of his Facebook shares - worth £36bn ($45bn) - to the charitable foundation he runs with his wife, Priscilla Chan. 
 
 "Being a good corporate citizen is really important," he said. "We operate in a lot of different countries all around the world. 
 
 "We need to be help build those communities and that is what I am trying to do in my personal philanthropy - setting an example hopefully for other entrepreneurs who will build things in the future for how you should give back to the community and to the world. 
 
 "I care deeply about all of this, and it is a work in progress." ||||| The Facebook CEO criticized Trump’s ‘fearful’ anti-immigration rhetoric at the annual F8 developer event: ‘Instead of building walls we can help build bridges’ 
 
 When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, he pitched it as a way to get a date. 
 
 Opening his company’s annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zuckerberg illustrated just how ambitious he’s become in 14 years. Facebook, he says, will now bring the world online, pioneer artificial intelligence and perfect virtual reality (VR). 
 
 
 
 He introduced “bots” that would serve as robotic customer service reps for news, weather and retail companies, and showed how he wants to use virtual reality to put grandparents inside baby videos. He also brought on stage a carbon fiber tube from Facebook’s Aquila pilotless plane that will beam wireless internet down to parts of the developing world. 
 
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 “If you had told me Facebook was going to build a plane I would have told you you were crazy,” he said. The plane, which he said “weighs less than a small car”, will fly at 60,000ft (twice the height of commercial airliners) and be able to stay airborne for several months at a time. 
 
 Zuckerberg’s ambitions illustrate how technology companies are no longer content with getting people to visit their website or download their app; their future depends on being omnipresent in people’s lives. 
 
 In a thinly veiled attack on US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, Zuckerberg said: “I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward against this idea of a connected world. I hear fearful voices talking about building walls … It takes courage to chose hope over fear.” 
 
 The Facebook CEO has spent the past three years lobbying for more visas for foreign workers. 
 
 “Instead of building walls we can help build bridges. Instead of dividing people we can connect people. We do it one person at a time, one connection at time. That’s why I think the work we’re doing together is more important than it has ever been before,” he said. 
 
 Much of the buzz was around a seemingly nerdy new product: chat bots. Bots are tools that send live, automated messages or images into Facebook’s chat tool Messenger, which is used by 900 million people every month and 50m businesses. For many users, it will be their first experience of interacting with an artificial intelligence. 
 
 Developers will be able to build new chat bots to work with Messenger. Zuckerberg demonstrated Facebook’s first bots including CNN, which will send articles to users with conversational teasers, and 1-800-Flowers which can order flower deliveries with personalized messages. Other bots will deliver weather and news updates, receipts and shipping notification. 
 
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 For Facebook, the move is as much about making money as being social. If businesses use Facebook as a way to sell more, Facebook can make more money from them. 
 
 Speaking on stage, David Marcus, Facebook’s head of messaging and a former eBay executive, joked about how addictive it was to interact with businesses’ bots. “I guarantee you’re going to spend way more money than you want on this,” he said. 
 
 If bots are still foreign to normal people, they are the programming trend of the day here in Silicon Valley. After his speech, attendees struggled to fit inside a tent for a bots demo. “Is that us? Sweet!” he said as he marveled at the number of people trying to get in. 
 
 Customers have to opt in to engage with any company’s Messenger bot and, for now, companies aren’t supposed to use it for pure advertising. 
 
 Facebook’s other big push is more closely related to its original purpose for many consumers: as a place to post pictures. Except now, Zuckerberg says he imagines a future where consumers find ways to jump into their pictures. This year, the company started shipping its Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets and is working to develop “360-degree” cameras that capture all parts of a setting. 
 
 “You actually feel you’re right there with another person,” Zuckerberg said. 
 
 
 
 Gear VR, Facebook’s low-end virtual reality goggles, is part of a technology that Zuckerberg claimed is going to “change the way we all experience the world”. Customers have so far watched 2m hours of VR video, he said, and more than 50 games have been launched so far. 
 
 He also demonstrated an app that allowed two people to play together virtually, and said that in late 2016 Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, will launch a set of touch controllers which will allow users to touch and manipulate objects in virtual applications. “This will allow a whole new layer of immersion, a whole new set of social experiences across all these VR platforms … experiences you can’t have with any existing platform today.” 
 
 This will be paired with Facebook’s recent push into live video, which lets people broadcast whatever they’re doing from a smartphone. 
 
 “Just the other week, I saw a live video of a woman with her young kids skiing down the hill,” Zuckerberg said. “I really just want to make sure these kids get down this hill.” 
 
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 Zuckerberg also showed a mock-up of a pair of augmented-reality glasses that looked more like a normal pair of dark-rimmed specs. Augmented reality allows images and data to be overlaid on our view of the real world, and will mean that a lot of physical objects could potentially be replaced by an augmented-reality app, he said. 
 
 
 
 “In the future if you want to pull out your photos and make it as big as you want, you could pull out your AR glasses and make it as big as you want and show it to people … objects like your TV could be replaced by $1 apps in the AR app store.” 
 
 “But it will take a long time to make it work.” ||||| There’s a long-running theory that Mark Zuckerberg has presidential aspirations. It makes sense to wonder. After all, if the civically engaged and ambitious billionaire leader of the most powerful media company on the planet wanted to take on a new challenge, why not try running a country? It’s not like he has many other opportunities for a promotion. 
 
 But only in recent weeks has a Zuckerberg run for the American presidency started to seem like a legitimate possibility. First there was his personal challenge for 2017: Zuckerberg’s aiming to visit and meet with people in all 50 states by the end of the year. 
 
 And not just that, but he framed the exercise in a way that sounds, well, political: “Going into this challenge, it seems we are at a turning point in history,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.” 
 
 Another post, which Zuckerberg published on Facebook last night, has a similarly campaign-esque vibe to it: 
 
 “Heading back home after a great few days in Texas. Today we drove down to Waco and stopped in smaller towns along the way. I had lunch with community leaders in Waxahachie who shared their pride in their home and their feelings on a divided country. I met young moms in West who moved back to their town because they want their kids to be raised with the same values they grew up with. And I met with ministers in Waco who are helping their congregations find deeper meaning in a changing world ... We may come from different backgrounds, but we all want to find purpose and authenticity in something bigger than ourselves.” 
 
 He also announced he’s starting a Facebook page for photos from his travels in 2017, which is another thing a political candidate would do.
– Welcome to 2017, when toasters have internet access, taxis drive themselves, and social media sites issue manifestos. Mark Zuckerberg set out his 5,500-word vision for the future in a Facebook post Thursday, setting out his plans to build "social infrastructure" that can help the world deal with issues such as climate change and terrorism, the Wall Street Journal reports. Zuckerberg tells the BBC that Facebook's mission of connecting the world has become more controversial in recent years, and while he still believes in building a global community, it must involve helping those who feel they've been left behind by globalization. Some key points from the manifesto: Facebook's next step. "For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families," Zuckerberg writes. "With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all." "Meaningful communities." Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to do more to help people connect with "meaningful communities" both online and offline, citing examples including the Black Fathers group. Safety measures. Facebook plans to build more infrastructure like its Safety Check, which helps people let others know they're safe during an emergency, and to help the community identify threats. "Right now, we're starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization," Zuckerberg writes. "Fake news." Zuckerberg says he wants to reduce sensationalism and polarization by making sure people see a range of viewpoints. "Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy," he writes. Civic engagement. "Just as TV became the primary medium for civic communication in the 1960s, social media is becoming this in the 21st century," Zuckerberg writes, setting out plans to boost civic engagement and help hundreds of millions of people around the world register to vote. Community standards. Zuckerberg makes it clear that he was stung by criticism of the site for taking down controversial material. He says since standards vary between users and between societies, people will be allowed to have their own settings, and "content will only be taken down if it is more objectionable than the most permissive options allow." "History has had many moments like today," Zuckerberg writes in conclusion. "As we've made our great leaps from tribes to cities to nations, we have always had to build social infrastructure like communities, media and governments for us to thrive and reach the next level ... We have done it before and we will do it again." He closes with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: "We can succeed only by concert. It is not 'can any of us imagine better?' but, 'can we all do better?' The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew."