After a day of criticism over his company’s role in spreading fake news about political candidates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the idea that the News Feed had tilted the election in favor of Donald Trump. “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. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” 
 
 Zuckerberg was speaking at the Technonomy conference, where interviewer David Kirkpatrick pressed him on Facebook’s growing power as a distributor of news and information. He said people who reacted with shock to Trump’s victory had underestimated his support. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.” 
 
 “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news.” 
 
 Zuckerberg suggested that one reason fake news could not have influenced the election is that false and inaccurate articles were posted about Trump and Hillary Clinton. “Why would you think there would be fake news on one side and not the other?” he said. But a BuzzFeed investigation earlier this year found that the top right-wing Facebook news outlets published false or misleading stories 38 percent of the time, compared to 20 percent for top left-wing outlets. 
 
 Kirkpatrick also pressed Zuckerberg on whether Facebook created a so-called “filter bubble” — an echo chamber where Hillary supporters only see views from fellow Hillary supporters, and Trump supporters only see views from fellow Trump supporters. “All the research we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem,” he said. Zuckerberg cited a study of 10.1 million politically affiliated Facebook users that the company published in Science last year. It found that liberals and conservatives see about 1 percent less news from the opposing side than they would if Facebook didn't tweak the news feed. 
 
 One hard truth that did emerge from the study is that people are simply less likely to click on articles that do not reinforce their previously held beliefs. “I think we would be surprised by how many things that don’t conform to our worldview, we just tune out,” Zuckerberg said. I don’t know what to do about that.” 
 
 “I want what we do to have a good impact on the world.” 
 
 Still, the study had several flaws, as noted by researcher Zeynep Tufekci and others. Among them: the study was conducted not on a random sample of users, but instead “a small, skewed subset of Facebook users who chose to self-identify their political affiliation on Facebook and regularly log on to Facebook, about ~4% of the population available for the study.” Another: because Facebook’s data is inherently private, it is difficult if not impossible for researchers to do additional, independent work on the problem. (Still, the Wall Street Journal recently found significant differences in the News Feed content distributed to liberals and conservatives.) 
 
 Zuckerberg said he is deeply concerned about how Facebook could affect democracy, and said there were (unspecified) things the company could do better in the future to improve the way it distributes news. “I really care about this. I want what we do to have a good impact on the world. I want people to have a diversity of information.” ||||| Media columnist 
 
 What a ridiculous notion, Mark Zuckerberg scoffed shortly after the election, that his social-media company — innocent, well-intentioned Facebook — could have helped Donald Trump's win. 
 
 "Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook . . . influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea," he said. "Voters make decisions based on their lived experience." 
 
 In fact, voters make their decisions based on many factors, not just their "lived experience." 
 
 Disinformation spread on Facebook clearly was one — a big one. That was obvious in November. It was obvious in April when Facebook, to its credit, announced some moves to combat the spread of lies in the form of news stories. 
 
 It's even more obvious now after Wednesday's news that Facebook sold ads during the campaign to a Russian "troll farm," targeting American voters with "divisive social and political messages" that fit right in with Donald Trump's campaign strategy. 
 
 The news, reported Wednesday by The Washington Post, fits right in with the findings of a fascinating recent study by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Analyzing reams of data, it documented the huge role that propaganda, in various forms, played in the 2016 campaign. 
 
 "Attempts by the [Hillary] Clinton campaign to define her campaign on competence, experience, and policy positions were drowned out by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails," the study said. 
 
 The Trump campaign masterfully manipulated these messages. Truth was not a requirement. 
 
 And Facebook was the indispensable messenger. As the Harvard study noted: "Disproportionate popularity on Facebook is a strong indicator of highly partisan and unreliable media." 
 
 We don't know everything about Facebook's role in the campaign. What we do know — or certainly ought to know by now — is to not take Facebook at its word. It always plays down its influence, trying for a benign image of connecting us all in a warm bath of baby pictures, tropical vacations and games of Candy Crush. 
 
 The company recently changed its mission statement, as John Lanchester noted in a blistering takedown in the London Review of Books, mocking the "canting pieties" of such corporate efforts. What used to be just a soft ideal of "making the world more open and connected" is now giving people "the power to build community and bring the world closer together." 
 
 The new mission statement didn't specifically mention bringing Russia and the United States closer together. But Facebook managed to accomplish that anyway. 
 
 Here's an undeniable fact: Facebook is about advertising. And it is so wildly successful at leveraging our eyeballs and spending power into ad dollars that it is now valued at nearly $500 billion. 
 
 But for all its power and wealth, Facebook is a terribly opaque enterprise. (It recently hired former New York Times public editor Liz Spayd, a former Post managing editor, to help with "transparency." Let's just say that she has her work cut out for her.) 
 
 Facebook also has never acknowledged the glaringly obvious — that it is essentially a media company, where many of its 2 billion active monthly users get the majority of their news and information. As I've been pointing out here for more than a year, it constantly makes editorial decisions, but never owns them. 
 
 When its information is false, when it is purchased and manipulated to affect the outcome of an election, the effect is enormous. When the information purveyors are associated with a foreign adversary — with a clear interest in the outcome of the American election — we're into a whole new realm of power. 
 
 Would Donald Trump be president today if Facebook didn't exist? Although there is a long list of reasons for his win, there's increasing reason to believe the answer is no. 
 
 I don't know how to deal with Facebook's singular power in the world. But having everyone clearly acknowledge it — including the company itself — would be a start. 
 
 For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan ||||| BuzzFeed / Getty Images 
 
 In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found. During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.) Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets. 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 "I’m troubled that Facebook is doing so little to combat fake news," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College who researches political misinformation and fact-checking. "Even if they did not swing the election, the evidence is clear that bogus stories have incredible reach on the network. Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it." 
 
 A Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News that the top stories don't reflect overall engagement on the platform. "There is a long tail of stories on Facebook," the spokesman said. "It may seem like the top stories get a lot of traction, but they represent a tiny fraction of the total." He also said that native video, live content, and image posts from major news outlets saw significant engagement on Facebook. Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump. 
 
 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 This new data illustrates the power of fake election news on Facebook, and comes as the social network deals with criticism that it allowed false content to run rampant during the 2016 presidential campaign. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said recently it was "a pretty crazy idea" to suggest that fake news on Facebook helped sway the election. He later published a post saying, "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here." 
 
 This week BuzzFeed News reported that a group of Facebook employees have formed a task force to tackle the issue, with one saying that "fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season." The Wall Street Journal also reported that Google would begin barring fake news websites from its AdSense advertising program. Facebook soon followed suit. These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate — and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This new analysis of election content found two false election stories from a Macedonian sites that made the top-10 list in terms of Facebook engagement int he final three months. Conservative State published a story that falsely quoted Hillary Clinton as saying, “I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; they’re honest and can’t be bought.” The story generated over 481,000 engagements on Facebook. A second false story from a Macedonia site falsely claimed that Clinton was about to be indicted. It received 149,000 engagements on Facebook. All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News' analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump "refugees" from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.) The other false viral election stories from hyperpartisan sites came from right-wing publishers, according to the analysis. 
 
 Ending the Fed 
 
 One example is the remarkably successful, utterly untrustworthy site Ending the Fed. It was responsible for four of the top 10 false election stories identified in the analysis: Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS, Hillary Clinton being disqualified from holding federal office, and the FBI director receiving millions from the Clinton Foundation. These four stories racked up a total of roughly 2,953,000 Facebook engagements in the three months leading up to Election Day. 
 
 Ending the Fed gained notoriety in August when Facebook promoted its story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News as a top trending item. The strong engagement the site has seen on Facebook may help explain how one of its stories was featured in the Trending box. The site, which does not publicly list an owner or editor, did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News. Like several other hyperpartisan right-wing sites that scored big Facebook hits this election season, Ending the Fed is a relatively new website. The domain endingthefed.com was only registered in in March. Yet according to BuzzFeed News' analysis, its top election content received more Facebook engagement than stories from the Washington Post and New York Times. For example, the top four election stories from the Post generated roughly 2,774,000 Facebook engagements — nearly 180,000 fewer than Ending the Fed's top four false posts. A look at Ending the Fed's traffic ranking chart from Alexa also gives an indication of the massive growth it experienced as the election drew close: 
 
 A similar spike occurred for Conservative State, a site that was only registered in September. It saw its traffic rank on Alexa spike almost instantly: 
 
 Alexa estimates that nearly 30% of Conservative State's traffic comes from Facebook, with 10% coming from Google. Along with unreliable hyperpartisan blogs, fake news sites also received a big election traffic bump in line with their Facebook success. The Burrard Street Journal scored nearly 380,000 Facebook engagements for a fake story about Obama saying he will not leave office if Trump is elected. It was published in September, right around the time Alexa notched a noticeable uptick in its traffic ranking: 
 
 That site was only registered in April of this year. Its publisher disputes the idea that its content is aimed at misleading readers. "The BS Journal is a satire news publication and makes absolutely no secret of that or any attempt to purposely mislead our readers," he told BuzzFeed News. Large news sites also generated strong Facebook engagement for links to their election stories. But to truly find the biggest election hits from these 19 major sites, it's necessary to go back to early 2016. The three biggest election hits for these outlets came back in February, led by a contributor post on the Huffington Post's blog about Donald Trump that received 2,200,000 engagements on Facebook. The top-performing election news story on Facebook for the 19 outlets analyzed was also published that month by CBS News. It generated an impressive 1.7 million shares, engagements, and comments on Facebook. Overall, a significant number of the top-performing posts on Facebook from major outlets were opinion pieces, rather than news stories. The biggest mainstream hit in the three months prior to the election came from the Washington Post and had 876,000 engagements. Yet somehow Ending the Fed — a site launched just months earlier with no history on Facebook and likely a very small group of people running it — managed to get more engagement for a false story during that same period. “People know there are concerned employees who are seeing something here which they consider a big problem,” a Facebook manager told BuzzFeed News this week. “And it doesn’t feel like the people making decisions are taking the concerns seriously.” ||||| Anant Goel, Nabanita De, Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft. Nabanita De Facebook is facing increasing criticism over its role in the 2016 US presidential election because it allowed propaganda lies disguised as news stories to spread on the social-media site unchecked. 
 
 The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a "dust cloud of nonsense." 
 
 And Business Insider's Alyson Shontell called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to this criticism "tone-deaf." His public stance is that fake news is such a small percentage of the stuff shared on Facebook that it couldn't have had an impact. This even while Facebook has officially vowed to do better and insisted that ferreting out the real news from the lies is a difficult technical problem. 
 
 Just how hard of a problem is it for an algorithm to determine real news from lies? 
 
 Not that hard. 
 
 During a hackathon at Princeton University, four college students created one in the form of a Chrome browser extension in just 36 hours. They named their project "FiB: Stop living a lie." 
 
 The students are Nabanita De, a second-year master's student in computer science student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University; Mark Craft, a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Qinglin Chen, a sophomore also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 
 
 Their News Feed authenticity checker works like this, De tells us: 
 
 "It classifies every post, be it pictures (Twitter snapshots), adult content pictures, fake links, malware links, fake news links as verified or non-verified using artificial intelligence. 
 
 "For links, we take into account the website's reputation, also query it against malware and phishing websites database and also take the content, search it on Google/Bing, retrieve searches with high confidence and summarize that link and show to the user. For pictures like Twitter snapshots, we convert the image to text, use the usernames mentioned in the tweet, to get all tweets of the user and check if current tweet was ever posted by the user." 
 
 The browser plug-in then adds a little tag in the corner that says whether the story is verified. 
 
 For instance, it discovered that this news story promising that pot cures cancer was fake, so it noted that the story was "not verified." 
 
 FiB project 
 
 But this news story about the Simpsons being bummed that the show predicted the election results? That was real and was tagged "verified." 
 
 FiB project 
 
 The students have released their extension as an open-source project, so any developer with the know-how can install it and tweak it. 
 
 A Chrome plug-in that labels fake news obviously isn't the total solution for Facebook to police itself. Ideally, Facebook will remove fake stuff completely, not just add a tiny, easy-to-miss tag that requires a browser extension. 
 
 But the students show that algorithms can be built to determine within reasonable certainty which news is true and which isn't and that something can be done to put that information in front of readers as they consider clicking. 
 
 Facebook, by the way, was one of the companies sponsoring this hackathon event. 
 
 Word is that many Facebook employees are so upset about this situation that a group of renegade employees inside the company is taking it upon themselves to figure out how to fix this issue, BuzzFeed reports. Maybe FiB will give them a head start.
– Some think the shady political memes, questionable quotes, and links to eyebrow-raising stories that proliferated on social media throughout the election may have had a significant impact on the actual outcome of the election. Except for someone who happens to know social media pretty well. "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 [it's] a pretty crazy idea," Mark Zuckerberg shrugged Thursday, per the Verge. "Voters make decisions based on their lived experience." And the Facebook chief—speaking at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., per Forbes—laid out a few reasons for why he feels this way. He cited a "profound lack of empathy" by those who insist other people voted only because of fake news. "If you believe that, then I don't think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election," he said, per the Verge. He also noted there were fake, misleading, or inaccurate Hillary Clinton-leaning articles as well on social media (though a BuzzFeed probe from October found nearly double the number of iffy posts on "hyperpartisan" right-wing sites than on left-wing ones). Zuckerberg also denied Facebook's algorithm creates an "echo chamber" that puts roadblocks up to receiving a diverse mix of information. One "hard truth" he did acknowledge: People just don't click on articles that appear to conflict with their own beliefs. "We just tune out [and] I don't know what to do about that," he admitted.