Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg scoffed at suggestions that the Facebook news feed had anything to do with election results:
I do think that there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news. I think if you believe that then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.
The quickest way to refute the fact that this surely had no impact is why would you think that there would be fake news on one side but not on the other side? We study this and we know that it’s a very small volume of anything, hoaxes aren’t new on Facebook. There have been hoaxes on the internet and there were hoaxes before.
I think that the idea that it had any impact on the election is pretty out there.
Possibly in response to the tech world’s hysteria over Trumps election to the Presidency and the protests of young Hillary supporters, Zuckerberg says progress will continue:
Well, we have a lot of work to do. But that would have been true either way. I don’t want to downplay the impact of this because elections have serious consequences for everyone in the country and probably around the world. There are a lot of people who are pretty happy about the result and there are a lot of people who are upset, but one thing that I think is easy to lose track of is that most progress is made by private citizens.
There are a lot of people all around the world right who are not in the US. There are a lot of people who are not a part of the government. There are companies that are pushing stuff forward. There’s technology and infrastructure that is getting built up over time more and more. That progress will continue.
Check out the full video interview below: