The US president denounced the spate of misinformation across social media platforms, including Facebook, suggesting American politics can be affected

President Barack Obama has spoken out about fake news on Facebook and other media platforms, suggesting that it helped undermine the US political process.

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“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.

Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers.

Obama said that we live in an age with “so much active misinformation” that is “packaged very well” and looks the same whether it’s on Facebook or on TV.

“If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” he said.

These comments come after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the “crazy idea” that fake news on the social network swayed voters in the US presidential election. That’s in spite of analysis by BuzzFeed that showed that fake news on the site outperformed real news in the run-up to polling day.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation have flourished on Facebook thanks to a network of highly partisan media outlets with questionable editorial policies, including a website called the Denver Guardian peddling stories about Clinton murdering people and a cluster of pro-Trump sites founded by teenagers in Veles, Macedonia, motivated only by the advertising dollars they can accrue if enough people click on their links.

It’s not the first time that Obama has commented on the problem. At a Democratic party rally on 7 November, he denounced the “crazy conspiracy theorizing” that spreads on Facebook, creating a “dust cloud of nonsense”.

The issue is not unique to Facebook. If you were to believe the top Google result for “final election results” on Monday, you’d think that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 election. He did not.

The slip-up was widely reported on Monday, demonstrating that though Google’s algorithms are also susceptible to fake news, the company wants to be seen as better at tackling it than Facebook. “The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users,” a Google spokeswoman said. “In this case we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms.”

Earlier this week both Google and Facebook announced plans to go after the revenue of fake news sites, kicking the hoaxers off their ad networks in an attempt to prevent misleading the public from being profitable. Although this reduces the financial incentive to generate fake news websites, it doesn’t tackle the distribution of such content on Facebook.

• This article was amended on 18 November 2016. An earlier version referred to a Republican rally where a Democratic party rally was meant.