Former President Barack Obama tried to warn Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the threat of fake news and its effect on the 2016 election less than two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidency, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
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Obama tried to warn Mark Zuckerberg about the threat of fake news right after Trump won
Zuckerberg acknowledged the threat of fake news but said it wasn't widespread. Now, Facebook is facing new questions.
Obama's appeal to the tech titan came following months of indecision within the administration's ranks about what to do about the elaborate and multi-faceted campaign Russia launched to interfere in the US election.
The Post found in June that even after Obama and his senior aides were provided with an intelligence report detailing how Russian hackers hadbreached the Democratic National Committee's serversin an attempt to damage Clinton's candidacy, they failed to act. That failure, the report said, was born out of an assumption that Clinton would win the November election regardless.
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Russia's meddling was a multi-pronged effort that included, among other things,
Facebook recently came under the microscope after it emerged that fake accounts linked to Russian entities used the platform to spread disinformation and bought $100,000 worth of divisive political ads leading up to the election.
The companystill does not knowthe extent of Russia's ad purchases or whether these unidentified ad buys are still on the site. Facebook has since confirmed that Russia-linked groups went further than buying ads and posting memes — they tried to organize anti-immigrant, anti-Clinton rallies inTexasandIdaho.
Zuckerbergsaid in a statement on Thursdaythat the company was examining how the presidential campaigns used its tools to promote ads or other content during the election.
In doing so, Facebook will look not only into "foreign actors, including additional Russian groups and other former Soviet states," Zuckerberg said, but also "organizations like the campaigns" to further its "understanding of how they used our tools."
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Natasha Bertrand contributed reporting.
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