One of the many causes people have cited for Donald Trump's surprise victory in the week since the election is Facebook. Specifically, that the fake news and memes circulating on the social network influenced the electorate to a huge degree. While not quite accepting the claim that Facebook influenced the election, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will take steps to combat the fake and hoax news stories that appear on the site.

Two-thirds of American Facebook users get news on the site, which amounts to 44 percent of the general population of the United States. The company has come under fire for news feeds rife with fake stories, ranging from an imagined endorsement of Donald Trump by musician Kurt Cobain in 1993 to the surgeon general warning Americans about playing drinking games during the presidential debates. An October report by Buzzfeed News showed that hyper-partisan Facebook groups played an active role in disseminating the false information.

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In a note on Facebook, Zuckerberg said that "more than 99% of what people see is authentic," but that the site has "already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here." He did not cite any specific statistics backing up his claim about authentic news, but when pushed on in the comments to his post he responded that the "stat I mentioned is across the whole system. Depending on which pages you personally follow and who your friends are, you may see more or less. The power of Facebook is that you control what you see by who you choose to connect with."

According to Gizmodo, an anonymous source with "direct knowledge of the company's decision-making" says that the company "absolutely" has the power to shut down fake news site, but "there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives." That was especially true after reports that the company's valued Trending Topics had an anti-conservative bias. Zuckerberg did not offer any specifics on the company's plans to challenge fake news.

Elsewhere in the comments on his post, Zuckerberg reiterated his stance that Facebook is a blank platform above all else, challenging the idea that the site should consider itself a media company or anything else. The Aquila drone project, for example, "does not make it an aerospace company." The company cares "deeply about all these things. We are a technology company because the main thing we do across many products is engineer and build technology to enable all these things."

Source: USA Today

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