Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday (September 18) said revelations about U.S. government surveillance hurt users' trust in Internet companies and that knowing more about the programs would help relieve some of the public concerns.

In a rare appearance in Washington at an event hosted by The Atlantic magazine, the 29-year-old social media billionaire urged the federal government to tell the general public more about the requests for data it makes to Internet companies.

"What I can tell from the data that I see at Facebook is that I think the more transparency and communication the government could do about how they're requesting the data from us, the better everyone would feel about it," he said.

"From reading in the media, you couldn't get a sense whether the number of requests that the government makes is closer to a thousand or closer to a 100 million. ... I think the more transparency the government has, the better folks would feel."

Zuckerberg also expressed concerns that the outcry about vast secret spy programs run by the National Security Agency and the U.S. response could alienate other countries and hurt innovation globally.

Earlier this year, Facebook said some 1.1 billion people around the world used its site each month.

The tech sector has been pushing for more disclosures about government data requests as Internet companies seeks to shake off the concerns about their involvement in vast secret U.S. surveillance programs revealed by former spy contractor Edward Snowden.

Earlier this month, Facebook joined Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for freedom to disclose aggregate data about the orders and requests for information they receive under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the revelations about U.S. online surveillance had a much bigger impact on users' trust in Facebook than any criticisms related to the company's own privacy policies.

Presented by Adam Justice