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 so 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 accomplished that anyway.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Show all 9 1 /9 How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Lock your profile down If you haven’t done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab. From here, you can control who gets to see your future posts and friends list. Choose from Public, Friends, Only Me and Custom in the dropdown menu. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Limit old posts Annoyingly, changing this has no effect on who’s able to see your past Facebook posts. Instead, on the Privacy page, you have to click on Limit Past Posts, then select Limit Old Posts and finally hit Confirm on the pop-up. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Make yourself harder to find You can stop completely random people from adding you by selecting Friends of Friends from the dropdown menu in the Who can send you friend requests? section of the Privacy page. It’s also worth limiting who can find your Facebook profile with your number and email address. At the bottom of the page is the option to prevent search engines outside of Facebook from linking to your profile. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Control access to your Timeline You can limit who gets to post things on your Timeline and who gets to see posts on your Timeline too. In Settings, go to Timeline and Tagging and edit the sections you want to lock down. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Block people When you block someone, they won’t be able to see things you post on your Timeline, tag you, invite you to events or groups, start conversations with you or add you as a friend. To do it, go to Settings and Blocking. Annoyingly, you have to block people on Messenger separately. You can also add friends to your Restricted list here, which means they’ll still be friends with you but will only be able to see your public posts and things you share on a mutual friend's Timeline. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Review tags One of Facebook’s handiest privacy features is the ability to review posts you’re tagged in before they appear on your Timeline. They’ll still be visible on the News Feed while they’re fresh, but won’t be tied to your profile forever. In Timeline and Tagging, enable Timeline review controls. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Clean up your apps You can view a list of all of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account by going to Settings and Apps. The list might be longer than you expected it to be. It’s worth tidying this up to ensure things you no longer use lose access to your personal information. If you don’t want to log into websites and apps with your facebook account, scroll down and turn Platform off. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Change your ad preferences You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences by going to Settings and Adverts. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Download your data Facebook lets you download all of the data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a hell of a lot of information, which you should download to ensure you never over-share on the social network again.

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 $500bn (£380bn).

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 Washington 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 two 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.