Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired back after President Donald Trump on Wednesday tweeted that the social network "was always anti-Trump" and colluded with The New York Times and Washington Post to distribute "fake news."
Facebook was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2017
"Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump," Zuckerberg wrote in a statement posted to Facebook. "Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like.
"Facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was different from what most are saying," Zuckerberg continued. But he expressed regret for saying in November that fake news on Facebook influencing the election was a "pretty crazy idea."
"Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it," Zuckerberg wrote. "This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact—from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote—played a far bigger role in this election."
Zuckerberg pointed out that campaigns spent "hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out," which he said is "1000x more than any problematic ads" Facebook has found.
Facebook earlier this month said 470 "inauthentic" accounts and Pages that "likely operated out of Russia" spent approximately $100,000 between June 2015 and May 2017 on 3,000 Facebook ads. Those ads were focused on "amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."
Last week, Facebook provided Congress with details about those ads; it previously handed them over to Robert Mueller's special counsel, too.
Facebook is not the only social network feeling the heat. A new report from the Oxford Internet Institute finds that in a 10-day period around the time of the 2016 election, "Twitter users got more misinformation, polarizing, and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news." And "average levels of misinformation were higher in swing states than in uncontested states, even when weighted for the relative size of the user population in each state."
Twitter officials will meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors today to discuss the impact of Russia-linked accounts on the election, CNN reports. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have also been invited to testify publicy before the committee on Nov. 1.
Facebook did tangle with conservatives last year when its Trending Topics editors were accused of suppressing content from conservative outlets. Facebook invited conservatives to its headquarters to discuss the issue, and later replaced human Trending editors with algorithms.