Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, said his social media company was able to eliminate a "significant number" of foreign fake news accounts ahead of the Dec. 12 Alabama special Senate election.

"In last year, in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new (artificial intelligence) tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those," Zuckerberg said during the interview with two reporters with The Times. "And that, actually, is something I haven't talked about publicly before, so you're the first people I'm telling about that."

Zuckerberg didn't provide additional details. AL.com has reached out to Facebook for more information.

Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore to win the Senate seat long held by current U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He won the election by 20,715 votes.

Zuckerberg's statement came during an interview in which he discussed measures Facebook is planning to take to improve security of the social media site. The company has come under fire after news was revealed that the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly obtained and exploited personal data from 50 million Facebook users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg, in the New York Times interview, admitted that Facebook did not have a good handle on foreign interference in the presidential election. Initially, after the election in 2016, he dismissed the notion of fake news on Facebook influencing the presidential election as a "crazy idea."

Also in the New York Times interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook was able to disable tens of thousands of fake news accounts ahead of the 2017 French presidential election.

"The good news here is that these problems aren't necessarily rocket science," Zuckerberg told The Times. "They're hard, but they're things that if you invest and work on making it harder for adversaries to do what they're trying to do, you can really reduce the amount of false news, make it harder for foreign governments to interfere."

Facebook has come under fire in recent days, after the initial stories about Cambridge Analytica surfaced. A #DeleteFacebook movement has since surfaced, which Zuckerberg said represented a "major trust issue for people."

"I don't think we've seen a meaningful number of people act on that, but, you know, it's not good," Zuckerberg told The Times. "And whether people delete their app over it or just don't feel good about using Facebook, that's a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify."