The outcome of US Presidential Election 2016 shocked the world. The situation was particularly distressing in America where the citizens took to streets to express their shock and anger over the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States.
While some people decided to move forward and filed petitions to secede from the union of America (check COW states), others blamed Facebook for toppling the election outcome. The argument was that was put forward by the liberal media was that the flurry of fake posts presented a controversial image of the democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and misinformed people about the statistics events and unfolding prior to the election day.
However, this criticism was dismissed by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg saying that 99% of the content that people see on the social networking platform is “authentic”.
“To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said during the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay in California, ABC News reported.
The Facebook founder further addressed the issue in a Facebook post saying, “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”
“Identifying the “truth” is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook has already launched work enabling its developers to flag hoaxes and fake news and that he would share more information soon.
