Mark Zuckerberg has rejected claims that Facebook influenced the US election by allowing fake and incendiary news stories to thrive on the social network.
"The idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it's a very small amount of the content, influenced the election is a pretty crazy idea," Zuckerberg said at the Techonomy conference in California on Thursday night.
The social network has been hit by claims during and after the election that its News Feed algorithm and Trending Topics section showed users many hoax news stories or hyper-partisan articles, helping spread misinformation about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Responding to the allegations for the first time, Zuckerberg suggested they were a result of critics failing to understand why Americans voted for Trump, and seeking something to blame.
Critics of Facebook claim that it has failed to crack down on deliberately false or misleading stories, which often spread virally around the site, a claim that has been supported by studies into news on Facebook. It has also been accused of creating a "filter bubble" effect in which the News Feed ends up only showing content that supports users' own political slants.
Zuckerberg said there were fake news stories on both sides, and that hoaxes "aren't new on Facebook".
He also said that the range of opinions on Facebook is more diverse than in traditional media, and that this means users are in fact often shown things that are against their own political beliefs. He said the problem was that they choose to ignore it.
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