Palo Alto, California (CNN) -- President Barack Obama isn't just in the news Wednesday. He'll also be in your news feed.
The White House is holding a "town hall" at Facebook headquarters, where the president is expected to answer questions before a small audience about the economy and the federal deficit. The event also will be broadcast live online to Facebook's more than 500 million users, starting at 1:45 p.m. PT (4:45 p.m. ET).
Facebook representatives will choose questions from among the queries submitted in advance by audience members and by people tuning in on the Web. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will moderate.
The event will be the second recent meeting between Obama and the 26-year-old computer whiz, who launched the hugely popular social-networking site from his Harvard University dorm room.
They dined together at an exclusive Silicon Valley dinner in February, joined by about a dozen other tech-industry elites. Zuckerberg was seated to the president's immediate right.
Obama also praised Facebook in his State of the Union speech in January, placing Zuckerberg's creation in a pantheon of great American-ingenuity success stories, beside the inventors of the light bulb and the airplane.
"We're the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook," Obama said in that speech. "In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It is how we make our living."
Wednesday's Facebook visit marks the second of three "town hall" events Obama has scheduled this week to take questions on the economy and White House deficit-reduction proposals.
During a similar event Tuesday in Virginia, Obama delivered campaign-style messages that emphasized what he called his balanced approach to reducing federal deficits and lowering the national debt. He's also scheduled to appear Thursday at a town-hall meeting in Reno, Nevada.
"The president is looking forward to visiting Facebook and speaking directly to the American people about his plan for responsibly bringing down the deficit and continuing on the path to economic recovery," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. "This is a part of our effort to hear from the American people."
The president's blitz comes as Congress faces two major fiscal issues in coming months: passing a budget for fiscal year 2012, which begins October 1, and raising the federal debt ceiling so the government can continue meeting its obligations.
Obama's plan, which is at odds with proposals by congressional Republicans, calls for an end to tax cuts for the rich, further reforms to Medicare and Medicaid and a reduction in military spending.
Republicans are demanding significant fiscal reforms, such as a balanced budget amendment and mandatory spending caps.
By letting Facebook choose the questions for Obama at its town hall, the White House has elected not to use a technology -- created by Facebook's rival, Google -- it has employed online in the past by letting citizens vote on each other's questions. With that system, questions sometimes strayed from key talking points and to tangential topics such as marijuana legalization.
Source : edition.cnn.com
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