 A BuzzFeed News analysis found that three big right-wing Facebook pages published false or misleading information 38% of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20% of posts. A recent feature in the New York Times Magazine reported on the growth and influence of these pages, saying they "have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture." None of this is, in particular, new; the structures of political power have been challenged frequently in the past century, mostly by the arrival of new media — radio, television, cable — that changed the scale of the audience, and, consequently, the political and social culture of the country. The bottom line is that people who regularly consume information from these pages — especially those on the right — are being fed false or misleading information. Mainstream pages did not share any completely false information, but did publish a small number of posts that included unverified claims. BuzzFeed News 
 
 Alarmingly, we found examples of pages on the left and on the right presenting fake news articles as real. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. "All news outlets have a responsibility to be accurate and when mistakes are made, it’s important to deal with them seriously ... Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms. This Occupy Democrats scrape and repost of a Daily Show segment with Trump supporters received more than 1 million shares: 
 
 
 
 Echo Chambers and Polarization One thing we noticed when trying to fact-check posts was that these pages, and the websites connected to them, largely aggregate information from elsewhere. 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. 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.
– 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.