The conduit must be pure. The platform must be neutral. Because Mark Zuckerberg wants his company’s role in the election to be seen like this: Facebook had a huge effect on voting—and no impact on votes.

Zuckerberg describes Facebook’s central role in the election himself. “More people had a voice in this election than ever before. There were billions of interactions discussing the issues that may have never happened offline. Every topic was discussed, not just what the media covered,” he wrote. “This was the first U.S. election where the internet was a primary way candidates communicated. Every candidate had a Facebook page to communicate directly with tens of millions of followers every day.”

Facebook even registered 2 million people to vote, which Zuckerberg notes was “bigger than the get-out-the-vote efforts of the Trump and Clinton campaigns put together.”

Half apologizing for calling the idea that the spread of misinformation on his platform swung the election “crazy,” he continued, “the data we have has always shown that our broader impact—from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote—played a far bigger role in this election.”

But given all that, couldn’t even small structural wrinkles in Facebook have provided more support for one candidate over another? Are we to believe that despite this admittedly enormous impact on 2016, the platform somehow maintained perfect neutrality with respect to the candidates?

One of the foundational documents of the academic field of science and technology studies is a talk given by Melvin Kranzberg, of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In it, he declared six incisive, playful “laws” of technology. The first one is: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

He explains:

“Technology’s interaction with the social ecology is such that technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances.”

And this is the rub with Facebook right now. The technology that has, more or less, created Facebook’s current status as the world’s leading purveyor of information is News Feed.

News Feed had to solve a basic problem: There were always too many posts by people you know and organizations you follow to show them all to you. So, Facebook’s engineers decided to find a way to rank them that wasn’t just chronological. It makes some sense: Why show you four posts from Sports Illustrated before showing you a post from your father?

The News Feed, then, takes many pieces of data about each story and the way that story is playing in your social network to order your personal feed. As a technology, it is one of the most successful products of all time. People spend countless hours on Facebook precisely because News Feed keeps showing them stuff that they want to interact with.