Trending News

Mark Zuckerberg Denies Facebook News Feed Bubble Was Responsible For Election Events

By Debaleen Sengupta | Update Date: Nov 12, 2016 07:02 AM EST

Donald Trump has won the Presidency, and people are blaming Facebook for the spread of fake news, which led to Trump winning. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied the allegations.

Many journalists and media speakers are dissatisfied that Facebook didn't do enough to suppress pro-Trump articles and fake news about Hillary Clinton from spreading, which may in turn have helped the Trump campaign and reduced support for the Hillary campaign. Media outlets also spoke about how these pro-Trump anti-Clinton stories were getting shared and reshared by users.

When Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook's role in the election, he said "We have a lot of work to do. That would have been true either way. I don't want to downplay the significance of this, because elections have serious consequences for everyone in the country and probably around the world". Zuckerberg didn't give a statement on the president-elect Trump, and said that no matter what people do, progress will continue.

Mark denied Facebook had anything to do with how things turned out, and said, "There's not really a way that a company like ours would happen to know something like that. We could do that, but so could someone else". Mark also stated that he did not believe that Facebook did nothing to filter out hate-mongers from posting, reposting and sharing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton statuses and articles.

"When it comes to News Feed ranking we are very transparent, and every time we make a change we tell people what we're doing. 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," he said.

Mark also noted that if people believed that if fake news had accelerated how the events turned out to be, people are lacking understanding, as Trump won due to his supporters and not Facebook.

Zuckerberg also added that Facebook is a lot more diversified than mainstream media and he cannot do anything about how people feel about a news that was posted or shared in the News Feed.

© 2023 Counsel & Heal All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics