Sheryl Sandberg: Facebook Did Not Sway US Election Results

First Posted: Dec 10, 2016 04:48 AM EST
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Fake news on Facebook didn't win the election for Doland Trump, Sheryl Sandberd, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, said on Thursday. She was speaking to Savannah Guthrie at the "Today Show" and expressed concern about the fake news floating on Facebook. She said that the company is working on addressing the issue of fake news which has spread throughout the site.

Sandberg said "We at Facebook definitely don't think that the fake news had anything to do with the election results, but we do take the responsibility very seriously". She also said that the US Elections was the most trending topic on Facebook in the year 2016. She attributed the popularity of the topic to the "Facebook Live" feature. The latter is a new feature and helps people with going live on Facebook. The audience can watch the feed in real time and comment as well.

The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had said the same thing when he was asked about fake news. While giving an interview at Technomy's Conference on 20 Nov , he had said that Facebook doesn't cater to "ideological echo chambers". Zuckerberg had also said that all the fake news at Facebook made up a "very small amount" of the website content. He had put down the election results to "voters making their own decisions based on their own experiences".

About ten days before Zuckerberg's interview, Barack Obama had expressed concern about how certain articles on Facebook are presented to the users of the site. He had said that the social networking site can act as a perfect platform for people who are trying to spread fake news.

Trending news site BuzzFeed had conducted its own investigation to the allegations of fake news at Facebook. The results showed that all the fake news on Facebook had garner more views than all the real news from media outlets.

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