http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html
-/////

NY TIMES
By MIKE ISAAC
MAY 25, 2017
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In March, Mark Zuckerberg visited the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the site of a mass ****** by a white supremacist.

Last month, he went to Dayton, Ohio, to sit down with recovering opioid addicts at a rehabilitation center.

And he spent an afternoon in Blanchardville, Wis., with Jed Gant, whose family has owned a dairy and beef cattle farm for six generations.


Mr. Zuckerberg in March at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., which was attacked by a white supremacist in 2015.
FACEBOOK
These were all stops along a road trip by Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, across the United States this year. His goal: to visit every state in the union and learn more about a sliver of the nearly two billion people who regularly use the social network.

On Thursday, in a commencement speech at Harvard, from which he dropped out in 2005, Mr. Zuckerberg discussed how his views on how people live and work with one another had broadened, partly as a result of what he has seen on the tour. He said he had come to realize that churches, civic centers and other organized meeting places are integral to building and maintaining a strong sense of community.


“As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after-school program or somewhere to go,” said Mr. Zuckerberg, who also received an honorary doctoral degree at the ceremony. “I’ve met factory workers who know their old jobs aren’t coming back and are trying to find their place.”

To his critics, Mr. Zuckerberg’s road trip is a stunt and has taken on the trappings of a political campaign. His every pit stop — eating with a farming family in Ohio; feeding a baby calf at a farm in Wisconsin — has been artfully photographed and managed, and then posted to Mr. Zuckerberg’s Facebook page.


Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, on Thursday at Harvard University, which awarded him an honorary doctoral degree 12 years after he dropped out of college there.
KAYANA SZYMCZAK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“He has all of the mechanics needed for a massive, well-staged media operation,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog group. “Photographers, handlers, its size, scope and scale — all the ingredients are there. And he’s appearing in an environment where there’s no sole Democratic leader or counterbalance to Trump, who’s consuming all the oxygen in media.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has publicly denied that he is using the visits as a platform to run for public office. He has said they are a way to “get a broader perspective” to inform how he runs Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company through which he plans to give away the majority of his wealth over the course of his life.

So far, Mr. Zuckerberg has made it to roughly half the states, including ones he has previously spent time in. The visits have plunged him into self-reflection, according to four current and former colleagues and people close to the chief executive who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The self-reflection is especially the case as Facebook has wrestled with more questions about its responsibilities and its role in the lives of its users, many of whom rely on the network for news and information.

The trips are part of a real-world education for Mr. Zuckerberg, who grew up comfortably upper middle class in the suburbs of New York, walked the elite halls of Harvard and then moved to Silicon Valley, where he became a paper multibillionaire by the time he was 23. (He is now 33.)


Mr. Zuckerberg has said his road trip and visits to churches, homes and workplaces is a way to “get a broader perspective” that can inform how he runs Facebook.
FACEBOOK
Recent events have forced Mr. Zuckerberg to step out of that Silicon Valley bubble. Last year, after the presidential election, Facebook was assailed as a repository of fake news that influenced the way the American electorate voted. People have also posted videos of killings on Facebook, raising questions about what responsibility the social network bears in distributing such content.

(In a related development, the website of The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, was hacked on Thursday with stories briefly replaced by Facebook-related fake news, including some that mocked Mr. Zuckerberg.)


The American road trip follows many international travels for Mr. Zuckerberg in 2015 and 2016. In January, he said on Facebook that he wanted to talk to more people about how they’re “living, working and thinking about the future.” Friends said Mr. Zuckerberg was catching up on many things that he missed out on by spending the last 10 years in Silicon Valley building a $438 billion company.

“I think he’s just really curious and wants to visit all the places that he’s never been,” said Ashley Gant, 27, who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg when he visited her family’s Wisconsin dairy farm in April. Over a midday meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and her grandmother’s applesauce Jell-O, Ms. Gant said, she answered the chief executive’s questions about daily life on a farm.