Mark Zuckerberg doesn't believe that Facebook, the largest social network on planet Earth and a major news platform, could have influenced the outcome of the presidential election.
"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea," the Facebook CEO reportedly said Thursday night at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, California. "Voters make decisions based on their lived experience."
Wowza.
Facebook has come under fire this year for allowing the proliferation of misleading information in its News Feed, where a tremendous number of people receive information every day -- 1.18 billion people, according to the social network's own numbers.
Others at the organization are taking the company's responsibility to its users seriously. Earlier Thursday, a Facebook vice president stated that the company will work to combat hoaxes.
"We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation," Adam Mosseri, Facebook VP of product management, said.
The company has made similar statements at least four other times in the past two years.
But Zuckerberg, who's been dismissive about his company's role in the media business in the past, apparently doesn't believe that his vast userbase actually cares about the content they consume on Facebook. While it's obviously impossible to define how exposure to certain articles, video or photographs impacts an individual's life, it's downright cynical to suggest it all has zero effect. If that was true, none of us would care about opening that blue app every single day.
Besides, recent findings from the Pew Research Center actually indicate that 20 percent of Americans have changed their views on an issue because of something they've seen on social media. And while Zuckerberg said fake news is "a very small amount of the content" shared on Facebook, Mashable found Wednesday that just one bogus article about Hillary Clinton was potentially distributed to over 2 million people.
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Plenty more bogus news stories -- often supporting right-wing viewpoints -- were distributed on Facebook this year, and one might imagine they had an effect on some people given that such is the very essence of reading information.
Back to the work of figuring this problem out, Facebook.
