'Facebook in no hurry to go public'

FACEBOOK is in no hurry to go public or to get into China, where it is officially blocked, according to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant.

Zuckerberg, in an interview with a US television programme, also said the role of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings may have been "a bit overblown".

In the interview conducted last week at Fachebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Zuckerberg said that going into China would raise "hard questions" and "issues" for Facebook, which has more than 800 million members.

"But since, for right now, we're not available, and we don't have an immediate path to become available, these are not policy decisions we have to make," he said.

"At some point I think there would be some discussion around what it would take to go there, and then we'd at that point have to figure out whether we were willing to do that," Zuckerberg said.

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