"To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Zuckerberg said November 10 during the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California.
He said instead that people underestimated the amount of support for Donald Trump.
"I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news," Zuckerberg said. "If you believe that, then I don't think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election."
Earlier this year, Facebook news aggregator Trending Topics was slammed for allegedly promoting politically biased stories by its human editors who filtered out conservative news. The social media giant then replaced the editorial team with machine-learning algorithms. However, that has not helped much and fake stories continue to spread.
The social media giant assured users that it takes the issue seriously and will improve the algorithm. "We understand there's so much more we need to do," Adam Mosseri, Facebook's vice president of product management, said in a statement.
