"Everyone has the right to say what they want, have access to sites that they want, share what they want," Teddy Goff told POLITICO. | Getty Clinton digital chief: Democrats to target Facebook’s fake news

The Clinton campaign's chief digital strategist on Monday blamed Facebook for enabling the spread of misinformation about the Democratic nominee — and said Democrats in and out of government have been looking at how to tackle the "big problem" of fake news on the social network.

"Everyone has the right to say what they want, have access to sites that they want, share what they want," Teddy Goff told POLITICO. "But a publisher with a record of making stuff up is not likely to rank that highly on Google, and the equivalent ought to be the case on Facebook."


Critics on the left say false headlines on Facebook harmed Hillary Clinton and helped swing the election to Donald Trump. One fake news story titled "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead" from sources like The Denver Guardian, The Free Patriot and Red Flag News circulated on the social network prior to the election. Another, under the headline "Michelle Obama Deletes Hillary Clinton From Twitter," was picked up by conservative radio host Sean Hannity, who later apologized for spreading the lie.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed as "pretty crazy" the idea that the distribution of fake and misleading news items on the site could have influenced the 2016 presidential election.

"Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes," the Facebook CEO wrote in a post Saturday night. "The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other."

But Goff, who also served as digital director for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, said fake news on Facebook painting Clinton as corrupt, criminal or otherwise beyond the political pale did have an impact — and he said Democrats, even before the election was over, started looking at how to address it.

"Two, three weeks ago, many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is, both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit, and are talking about, this is one of the things we would like to take on post-election," he said. "This is something we were very aware of, saw zero percent chance Facebook was going to be compliant or work with us during the election, but wanted to take on post-election."

Goff declined to shed light on the strategy he says is in the works, other than to say that it would target "one or two people" at the company, including Zuckerberg. He also declined to say whether anyone within the Clinton campaign has reached out to the company to make their case.

Facebook had no comment beyond Zuckerberg's earlier statements on the issue.

This isn't the first time Facebook has faced charges that it is meddling in politics. Earlier this year, Republicans objected to alleged anti-conservative bias in its trending news sidebar. The company scrambled to make changes in response to the criticisms — reportedly including scaling back its team of trending news curators and going instead with a largely automated system.

"Any reasonable set of humans would probably be a little gun-shy after a thing like that," said Goff, speculating on why the company might have been reluctant to tweak its news feed during the election.

Other Democrats have taken aim at Facebook over the fake news issue.

Former Obama White House speech writer Jon Favreau tweeted that "Zuckerberg's position that Facebook has no responsibility for the fake news on their platform because it has no influence is beyond absurd."

Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet and a Clinton supporter, spoke last week about his own concerns about "the rise of misinformation" and said Google approaches the problem through ranking, or figuring out formulas based on websites' reputation and quality.

Goff endorsed that formula, saying, "Something that is made up does not have business going viral, and ought to be de-ranked in the same way that misinformation gets de-ranked on Google." But he also conceded that Google isn't perfect, pointing to fact that the top search result for "final vote tally" at one point this week produced a story that Trump won the popular vote.

But Facebook, he argues, is a particularly dangerous combination.

The site, he says, serves to gin up outrage but then fails to give users anything productive to do with their ire, contributing to a mentality that was particularly damaging to Clinton.

"We spend all day, every day on these platforms that encourage us to get pissed off, to piss off each other, to share information that's alarming," said Goff. "So you have rising despair and also a rising sense of helplessness, and that combination is extremely toxic, and contributes in a huge way to this 'throw the bums out' mentality."

Not all Clinton supporters are ready to put so much responsibility on Facebook.

"There was a huge problem with the news and information environment in the 2016 election, but it wasn’t Facebook-specific. Fox News regularly reported outright lies. Right-wing radio regularly reported outright lies," said Alec Ross, a former State Department aide to Clinton who advised the campaign on tech policy. "Facebook, which is a neutral platform, reported the lies its users posted there. So the problem overall is we have a polluted news-and-information environment."

"Everybody needs to take a breath and actually study this," he said.

Goff, for his part, said while Facebook fake news played a role in the election, he's not pinning the full blame for Clinton's loss on one social network, musing, "How many votes were directly affected by a piece of misinformation that a voter saw on Facebook, that's the thing that's unknowable."

Tony Romm contributed to this report.