Two days after Donald Trump was elected president, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, sat onstage at a Ritz-Carlton outside San Francisco and spoke of his deep understanding of the feelings of American voters. He was appearing at Techonomy’s annual retreat, a meeting of thought leaders in the worlds of technology, government, academia and business, and he was responding to a common criticism — the notion that Trump’s unconventional path to victory had benefited from a detour through Facebook, where a “filter bubble” distorts the flow of information and fake news stories loom large. “There is a certain profound lack of empathy,” he said, “in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.” When asked to articulate that message, he dodged the question.

“Empathy” is one of Facebook’s all-time favorite buzzwords. For years, Zuckerberg has hopped from conference to conference in a selection of muted hoodies and T-shirts, delivering variations on the same pitch. “More people are using Facebook to share more stuff,” he said in 2010. “That means that if we want, there’s more out there that we can go look at and research and understand what’s going on with the people around us. And I just think that leads to broader empathy, understanding — just a lot of good, core, human things that make society function better.” If you think Facebook may have had a hand in tipping popular opinion toward Trump, Zuckerberg seemed to suggest at the Ritz, then something was wrong with you — something that could be fixed by spending more time on Facebook.

He is not the only one shopping empathy as a cure for what ails us. In recent months, the Inspired Life blog of The Washington Post suggested “empathy for Trump voters.” In a Times Op-Ed article, Glenn Beck wrote, “Wouldn’t we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?” It all feels like a bit of a throwback: Just as many of our modern, scientific mechanisms for gauging the national mood — things like public-opinion polling and data journalism — failed to predict Trump’s victory, there has been a call for Americans to reach out and touch one another more directly.

But there is a curiously strategic underpinning to these calls for empathy, too. Empathy, after all, is not sympathy. Sympathy encourages a close affinity with other people: You feel their pain. Empathy suggests something more technical — a dispassionate approach to understanding the emotions of others. And these days, it often seems to mean understanding their pain just enough to get something out of it — to manipulate political, technological and consumerist outcomes in our own favor.