Despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to downplay Facebook's role in the election of Donald Trump, the scrutiny of how fake news is spread on the platform has intensified.
Buzzfeed News is reporting that "more than dozens" of Facebook employees have created an unofficial task force dedicated to addressing the issue.
Buzzfeed quoted one member of that task force, who did not want to be named over fears for their job.
"[Mark Zuckerberg] knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season," the source said.
The election shook out the way it did because there were ways around the narrative the media was pushing?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @06:58AM
Compare it to an ad campaign. If an ad campaign has a response rate of just 5% it would be considered incredibly successful. As facebook is first and foremost about advertising, it would be reasonable to say that months of highly viral fake news would motivate just 1% of the recipients to vote who would otherwise have been apathetic (or depressing 1% of borderline voters into not voting). That's just 1% of facebook users, not all registered voters. But Michigan is currently at a difference of just 12,000 votes, so facebook alone could have made the difference there.