After a day of criticism over his company’s role in spreading fake news about political candidates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the idea that the News Feed had tilted the election in favor of Donald Trump. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.” 
 
 Zuckerberg was speaking at the Technonomy conference, where interviewer David Kirkpatrick pressed him on Facebook’s growing power as a distributor of news and information. He said people who reacted with shock to Trump’s victory had underestimated his support. “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.” 
 
 “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news.” 
 
 Zuckerberg suggested that one reason fake news could not have influenced the election is that false and inaccurate articles were posted about Trump and Hillary Clinton. “Why would you think there would be fake news on one side and not the other?” he said. But a BuzzFeed investigation earlier this year found that the top right-wing Facebook news outlets published false or misleading stories 38 percent of the time, compared to 20 percent for top left-wing outlets. 
 
 Kirkpatrick also pressed Zuckerberg on whether Facebook created a so-called “filter bubble” — an echo chamber where Hillary supporters only see views from fellow Hillary supporters, and Trump supporters only see views from fellow Trump supporters. “All the research we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem,” he said. Zuckerberg cited a study of 10.1 million politically affiliated Facebook users that the company published in Science last year. It found that liberals and conservatives see about 1 percent less news from the opposing side than they would if Facebook didn't tweak the news feed. 
 
 One hard truth that did emerge from the study is that people are simply less likely to click on articles that do not reinforce their previously held beliefs. “I think we would be surprised by how many things that don’t conform to our worldview, we just tune out,” Zuckerberg said. I don’t know what to do about that.” 
 
 “I want what we do to have a good impact on the world.” 
 
 Still, the study had several flaws, as noted by researcher Zeynep Tufekci and others. Among them: the study was conducted not on a random sample of users, but instead “a small, skewed subset of Facebook users who chose to self-identify their political affiliation on Facebook and regularly log on to Facebook, about ~4% of the population available for the study.” Another: because Facebook’s data is inherently private, it is difficult if not impossible for researchers to do additional, independent work on the problem. (Still, the Wall Street Journal recently found significant differences in the News Feed content distributed to liberals and conservatives.) 
 
 Zuckerberg said he is deeply concerned about how Facebook could affect democracy, and said there were (unspecified) things the company could do better in the future to improve the way it distributes news. “I really care about this. I want what we do to have a good impact on the world. I want people to have a diversity of information.” ||||| FORBES LISTS 
 
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 View the list ||||| A close and — to pundits, journalists, and Democrats — unexpected victory like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s is always overdetermined, and no one particular thing pushed Trump over the edge on Tuesday night. His chosen party’s lately increasing openness to explicit white nationalism, the still-recent global-scale failure of the liberal economic consensus, the apparently deep-seated misogyny and racism of the American electorate, Hillary Clinton’s multiple shortcomings as a candidate, or even the last-minute intervention of FBI director James Comey might each have been, on its own, sufficient to hand the election to a man who is, by any reckoning, a dangerous and unpredictable bigot. 
 
 Still, it can be clarifying to identify the conditions that allowed access to the highest levels of the political syste a man so far outside what was, until recently, the political mainstream that not a single former presidential candidate from his own party would endorse him. In this case, the condition was: Facebook. 
 
 To some extent I’m using “Facebook” here as a stand-in for the half-dozen large and influential message boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics, but Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and power make it effectively the only one that matters. And, boy, does it matter. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I think there are few events over the last decade more significant than the social network’s wholesale acquisition of the traditional functions of news media (not to mention the political-party apparatus). Trump’s ascendancy is far from the first material consequence of Facebook’s conquering invasion of our social, cultural, and political lives, but it’s still a bracing reminder of the extent to which the social network is able to upend existing structure and transform society — and often not for the better. 
 
 The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. (To really hammer home the cyberdystopia aspect of this: A significant number of the sites are run by Macedonian teenagers looking to make some scratch.) 
 
 All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook: The Pope endorses Trump. Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms. The Clintons bought a $200 million house in the Maldives. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook’s labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle. Often, no one would even need to click on and read the story for the headline itself to become a widely distributed talking point, repeated elsewhere online, or, sometimes, in real life. (Here’s an in-the-wild sighting of a man telling a woman that Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin are lovers, based on “material that appeared to have been printed off the internet.”) 
 
 Profit motive, on the part of Macedonians or Americans, was not the only reason to share fake news, of course — there was an obvious ideological motivation to lie to or mislead potential voters — but the fake-news industry’s commitment to “engagement” above any particular political program has given it a terrifyingly nihilistic sheen that old-fashioned propagandists never displayed. (Say what you will about ratfucking, dude, at least it’s an ethos.) And at the heart of the problem, anyway, is not the motivations of the hoaxers but the structure of social media itself. Tens of millions of people, invigorated by insurgent outsider candidates and anger at perceived political enemies, were served up or shared emotionally charged news stories about the candidates, because Facebook’s sorting algorithm understood from experience that they were seeking such stories. Many of those stories were lies, or “parodies,” but their appearance and placement in a news feed were no different from those of any publisher with a commitment to, you know, not lying. As those people and their followers clicked on, shared, or otherwise engaged with those stories — which they did, because Trump drives engagement extremely bigly — they were served up even more of them. The engagement-driving feedback loop reached the heights of Facebook itself, which shared fake news to its front page on more than one occasion after firing the small team of editorial employees tasked with passing news judgment. Flush with Trump’s uniquely passionate supporter base, Facebook’s vast, personalized sewer system has become clogged with toxic fatbergs. 
 
 And it is, truly, vast: Something like 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day, a number that’s not only several orders of magnitude larger than even the most optimistic circulation reckonings of major news outlets but also about one-and-a-half times as many people as voted on Tuesday. Forty-four percent of all adults in the United States say they get news from Facebook, and access to to an audience of that size would seem to demand some kind of civic responsibility — an obligation to ensure that a group of people more sizable than the American electorate is not being misled. But whether through a failure of resources, of ideology, or of imagination, Facebook has seemed both uninterested in and incapable of even acknowledging that it has become the most efficient distributor of misinformation in human history. 
 
 Worst of all, it’s not clear there’s any remedy. The truth is that Facebook seems less malevolent here than insecure about its power, unsure of its purpose, and unclear about what its responsibilities really are. Frankly, too, I’m not sure I feel comfortable allowing Facebook’s heavy hand, which infamously censored the iconic “napalm girl” photograph, determining what is legitimate and what is illegitimate news; I feel even less comfortable ceding that determination to an algorithmic sorting mechanism as opaque as Facebook’s. Media columnist Jim Rutenberg’s suggestion in the New York Times that “[t]he cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good journalism” is inspiring, but it seems to me that the problem we face is not a lack of journalism, good or bad, but an overwhelming abundance of it. Fake-news attacks discourse in structurally similar ways to the DDoS attacks that recently crippled internet infrastructure for a day: Hoaxes overwhelm political conversation (facts, ideas, stories) with junk, aware that the rules of the system (in this case, freedom of speech) prevent it from distinguishing from “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” and therefore from stopping the attack. An overwhelming dose of good journalism, rather than addressing or rebutting lies and hoaxes, would simply add to the cacophony; presented identically on Facebook alongside fake journalism, it would merely appear as another opinion in a swarm of them. 
 
 Of course, lies and exaggerations have always been central to real political campaigns; Facebook has simply made them easier to spread, and discovered that it suffers no particular market punishment for doing so — humans seem to have a strong bias toward news that confirms their beliefs, and environments where those beliefs are unlikely to be challenged. 
 
 Really, I’m not sure that the most significant effect of Facebook’s dominance is the way it abets the already extant spread of mis- or disinformation. Rather (and I’m cribbing here from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and media pundit Clay Shirky) I think it’s the way it’s crowbarred open the window of acceptable political discourse, giving rise to communities and ideological alignments that would have been unable to survive in an era where information and political organization were tightly controlled by corporate publishers and Establishment political parties. Put another way, it’s not just that Facebook makes politics worse, it’s that it changes politics entirely. 
 
 For most of the 20th century, the flow of information was controlled by a relatively small number of media companies — large newspapers, and, later, the major broadcast networks. These companies were large and generally corporate, Establishment-friendly and politically centrist: They limited, mostly, the acceptable range of political opinion, because that nice middle was where advertising and subscription business models were most profitable. This limitation on the supply of information and opinion both enabled, and was enabled by, two Establishment political parties, which had effective control over political mobilization, having cobbled together unstable coalitions of voters bound by fairly tight ideological windows. 
 
 Facebook assaults both components of this power dynamic, providing the platform and audience that only news-media outlets could once command, and the organizing power that only parties once held. As then-Senator Obama understood well in 2008, the internet provides political candidates a previously unimaginable opportunity to identify, communicate with, and organize supporters — an opportunity that, significantly, exists outside the traditional party apparatus. Trump, like Obama before him, was able to connect with voters outside the more stifling confines of political-party organizing. Trump, a longtime Democrat with liberal social positions, rose to the nomination because he could express a political position — essentially, white welfare-state ethno-nationalism — that the party would once have choked off for threatening its delicate coalition of business interests and white workers. 
 
 Facebook connected those supporters to each other and to the candidate, gave them platforms far beyond what even the largest Establishment media organizations might have imagined, and allowed them to effectively self-organize outside the party structure. Who needs a GOTV database when you have millions of voters worked into a frenzy by nine months of sharing impassioned lies on Facebook, encouraging each other to participate? 
 
 Even better, Facebook allowed Trump to directly combat the hugely negative media coverage directed at him, simply by giving his campaign and its supporters another host of channels to distribute counterprogramming. This, precisely, is why more good journalism would have been unlikely to change anyone’s mind: The Post and the Times no longer have a monopoly on information about a candidate. Endless reports of corruption, venality, misogyny, and incompetence merely settle in a Facebook feed next to a hundred other articles from pro-Trump sources (if they settle into a Trump supporter’s feed at all) disputing or ignoring the deeply reported claims, or, as is often the case, just making up new and different stories. 
 
 None of this is, in particular, new; the structures of political power have been challenged frequently in the past century, mostly by the arrival of new media — radio, television, cable — that changed the scale of the audience, and, consequently, the political and social culture of the country. Every time a new medium expands the possible audience of mass media, and opens up new spaces for new voices to be heard, it upsets the delicate balances of power that rested upon the previous media structure. You know: If you thought radio changed politics, just wait till television. And if you thought television changed politics, just wait until Facebook really hits its stride. Or. Well. I guess it just did. ||||| A BuzzFeed News analysis found that three big right-wing Facebook pages published false or misleading information 38% of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20% of posts. 
 
 Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF Mark Davis / BuzzFeed News 
 
 Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison. Our analysis of three hyperpartisan right-wing Facebook pages found that 38% of all posts were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false, compared to 19% of posts from three hyperpartisan left-wing pages that were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false. The right-wing pages are among the forces — perhaps as potent as the cable news shows that have gotten far more attention — that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump. These pages, with names such as Eagle Rising on the right and Occupy Democrats on the left, represent a new and powerful force in American politics and society. Many have quickly grown to be as large as — and often much larger than — mainstream political news pages. A recent feature in the New York Times Magazine reported on the growth and influence of these pages, saying they "have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture." The rapid growth of these pages combines with BuzzFeed News' findings to suggest a troubling conclusion: The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world's biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear. This approach has precursors in partisan print and television media, but has gained a new scale of distribution on Facebook. And while it isn't a solely American phenomenon — the British Labour party found powerful support from a similar voice — these pages are central to understanding a profoundly polarized moment in American life. 
 
 For example, in late September, Freedom Daily, a Facebook page with more than 1 million fans, scored a viral hit with a post that filled its audience with racial outrage. 
 
 The post linked to an article on the Freedom Daily website with the headline "Two White Men Doused With Gasoline, Set On FIRE By Blacks – Media CENSORED (VIDEO)." The text that accompanied the link on Facebook connected the attack to recent Black Lives Matter protests and urged people to share the post "if you're angry as hell & aren't going to take it anymore!" 
 
 
 
 Freedom Daily / Facebook / Via Facebook: FreedomDailyNews 
 
 Anyone clicking on the link saw a video of the altercation, with some additional commentary. "Back in the day, when people were a lot smarter and America was great, this would have been a lot different," the article said. 
 
 But nowhere in the article or Facebook post did Freedom Daily make it clear that this incident happened almost a year ago, and that it had absolutely no connection to Black Lives Matter. The falsehoods continued from there: The altercation was actually between two people, a black man and his co-worker — and perhaps most importantly, the co-worker is not white. Court documents allege that the fight began with the co-worker throwing the first punch. Prosecutors also said the second man caught fire as a result of him coming into contact with the first man who was engulfed in flames. And finally, in spite of the headline's claim that the incident was "CENSORED" by the media, it was widely covered by Baltimore media as well as by CNN and the Daily Mail's website. (The man who allegedly set the fire, Christopher Harrison Jr., was charged with attempted first-degree murder, reckless endangerment, and first- and second-degree assault.) But these details only stood in the way of success on Facebook. In the end, Freedom Daily's largely false post was shared more than 14,000 times, generating more than 9,000 reactions and over 2,000 angry comments on Facebook. "Not even animals would do this," reads the most liked comment on the post. "Time to hang these people." Pages like Freedom Daily play to the biases of their audiences — and to those of Facebook's News Feed algorithm — by sharing videos, photos, and links that demonize opposing points of view. They write explosive headlines and passages that urge people to click and share in order to show their support, or to express outrage. And in this tense and polarizing presidential election season, they continue to grow and gain influence. "They are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm," wrote John Herrman in the New York Times Magazine. 
 
 These pages are also a constant source of dubious, misleading, or completely false information. During the period analyzed, right-wing pages, for example, pushed a conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton body double, recirculated an old and false story about a Canadian mayor lecturing Muslim immigrants about integration, wrongly claimed that Obama's last address at the UN saw him tell Americans they needed to give up their freedom for a "New World Government," and falsely claimed that a football player had been told not to pray by the NFL. 
 
 Left-wing pages wrongly claimed Putin's online troll factory was responsible for rigging online polls to show Trump won the first debate, falsely said that Trump wants to expel all Muslims from the US and said US women in the military should expect to be raped, claimed that TV networks would "not be fact-checking Donald Trump in any way" at the first debate, and completely misrepresented a quote from the pope to claim that he "flat out called Fox News type journalism 'terrorism.'" The bottom line is that people who regularly consume information from these pages — especially those on the right — are being fed false or misleading information. The nature of the falsehoods is important to note. They often take the form of claims and accusations against people, companies, police, movements such as Black Lives Matter, Muslims, or "liberals" or "conservatives" as a whole. They drive division and polarization. And in doing so, they generate massive Facebook engagement that brings more and more people to these pages and their websites and into the echo chamber of hyperpartisan media and beliefs. What We Did BuzzFeed News selected three large hyperpartisan Facebook pages each from the right and from the left, as well as three large mainstream political news pages. All nine pages have earned the coveted verified blue checkmark from Facebook, which gives them an additional layer of credibility on the platform. 
 
 BuzzFeed News The nine pages we analyzed. Fan numbers shown for each page are as of Oct. 17, 2016. 
 
 Over the course of seven weekdays (Sept. 19 to 23 and Sept. 26 and 27), we logged and fact-checked every single post published by these pages. Posts could be rated "mostly true," "mixture of true and false," or "mostly false." If we encountered a post that was satirical or opinion-driven, or that otherwise lacked a factual claim, we rated it "no factual content." (We chose to rate things as "mostly" true or false in order to allow for smaller errors or accurate facts within otherwise true or false claims or stories.) 
 
 We also gathered additional data: Facebook engagement numbers (shares, comments, and reactions) for each post were added from the Facebook API, and we noted whether the post was a link, photo, video, or text. Raters were asked to provide notes and sources to explain their rulings of "mixture of true and false" or "mostly false." They could also indicate whether they were unsure of a given rating, which would trigger a second review of the same post in order to ensure consistency. Any discrepancies between the two ratings were resolved by a third person. That same person conducted a final review of all posts that were rated mostly false to ensure they warranted that rating. (For more detail on the methodology and some notes on its limitations, see the bottom of this article, and you can view our data here.) In the end, our team rated and gathered data on 2,282 posts. There were 1,145 posts from mainstream pages, 666 from hyperpartisan right-wing pages, and 471 from hyperpartisan left-wing pages. The difference in the number of posts for each group is a result of them publishing with different frequencies. Accuracy: Right vs. Left 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 All nine pages consisted largely of content that was either mostly true or earned a "no factual content" rating. 
 
 However, during the time period analyzed, we found that right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages. Mainstream pages did not share any completely false information, but did publish a small number of posts that included unverified claims. (More on that below.) We rated 82 out of a total 666 right-wing Facebook posts as mostly false, for a percentage of 12.3%. Another 169 posts (25.4%) were rated as a mixture of true and false. Viewed separately or together (38%), this is an alarmingly high percentage. 
 
 Left-wing pages did not earn as many "mostly false" or "mixture of true and false" ratings, but they did share false and misleading content. We identified 22 mostly false posts out of a total of 471 from these pages, which means that just under 5% of left-wing posts were untrue. We rated close to 14% of these posts (68) a mixture of true and false. Taken together, nearly a fifth of all left-wing posts we analyzed were either partially or mostly false. One of the most common reasons we rated a post as a mixture of true and false was because the headline and/or Facebook share line introduced misinformation or was misleading to the audience. This frequently took the form of a shared link that contained accurate body text paired with a misleading headline, likely to drive social engagement and clicks. 
 
 For example, the left-wing page Addicting Info shared an article with the headline “Trump Loses Support Of Police Union After Saying Tulsa Shooting Cop ‘Choked’ (VIDEO).” But contrary to the claim in the headline, the article makes it clear that Trump didn't lose an endorsement. The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police merely gave a quote that was slightly critical of something Trump said. On the right, Freedom Daily posted a link to an article from the website Yes I'm Right. It carried the headline "Australia Voted To Ban Muslims And Liberals Are Pissed." The story correctly reports on the results of a poll that asked Australians if they would support or oppose a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia. But there was no vote to ban Muslims, making the headline completely false. (Side note: As illustrated by that headline, pages on the right and the left both love to talk about how something that happened made the other side lose their minds, freak out, get totally shut down, etc.) 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 Alarmingly, we found examples of pages on the left and on the right presenting fake news articles as real. Two left-wing pages, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%, posted a link to an article on U.S. Uncut that claimed the surgeon general of the US warned that drinking every time Trump lied during the first presidential debate could result in "acute alcohol poisoning." That story was an aggregation of a satirical Raw Story article with the same information, published earlier that day. ("Please do your fact-checking as responsibly as possible," joked the U.S. Uncut article that unwittingly presented false information as true.) 
 
 Right Wing News, a page with 3.3 million followers, shared a link to a story that claimed authorities in Charlotte had warned would-be rioters that their food stamps and other government benefits would be revoked if they were caught looting or rioting. That story came from the Baltimore Gazette, a fake news site. Update: After reading this story, John Hawkins, the owner of Right Wing News, got in touch to dispute some of the mostly false ratings given to his page. As a result of his feedback, we altered four ratings, as detailed in a correction added to this story. Hawkins also published a blog post that outlines his objections and argues that the majority of our mostly false ratings for his page are incorrect. (We disagree.) 
 
 
 
 "In the small number of instances where I concluded that Buzzfeed was right, I made sure to address those issues with our entire staff in an effort to insure that they didn’t happen again," Hawkins wrote. "All news outlets have a responsibility to be accurate and when mistakes are made, it’s important to deal with them seriously ... If Buzzfeed wants to fact check other people, it should start being careful about getting its own facts right." Accuracy: Mainstream Pages 
 
 Politico / Facebook / Via Facebook: politico This Politico exclusive spread to other mainstream outlets and saw a high number of Facebook shares. The story remains unconfirmed. 
 
 Mainstream pages did not publish any mostly false content on the days we checked. We did, however, encounter one story that spread to all three mainstream pages as well as some partisan pages and remains unconfirmed to this day. There were eight mainstream posts out of a total of 1,145 that earned the "mixture of true and false" rating. The majority of these were related to one story — the report from Politico that former President George H.W. Bush would be voting for Hillary Clinton. Our ratings guide dictated that any posts built solely on anonymous sources or on unverified claims should be given the "mixture" rating. Since President Bush and his spokesman refused to confirm or deny the report, we rated all stories that repeated this claim the same way. Politico's story about the former president was shared more than 14,000 times from its Facebook page, making it that page's biggest hit during the period we analyzed. Overall, we saw a high number of Facebook shares for stories about the Bush voting claim. But the sample number is too small to make any larger conclusion about how unverified stories perform compared to true stories on mainstream pages. Worst Offenders = High Engagement Which pages shared the least credible information? Freedom Daily, with its 1.3 million fans, was the most inaccurate and misleading page during the period we analyzed. It had the highest percentage of false posts of any page, at 23%, and also saw the same percentage of "mixture of true and false" posts. That means 46% — nearly half — of its total output during the seven days we studied was rated as false or misleading. Not coincidentally, Freedom Daily put up impressive Facebook engagement stats. It had by far the highest Facebook engagement (defined as the total number of reactions, likes, and shares) per post among the right-wing pages we studied. It ranked third among all nine pages for its median number of Facebook shares per post. (We considered shares to be the most important individual engagement metric, as Facebook itself has said it plays an important role in determining the spread of a post.) 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 Occupy Democrats was the largest page we analyzed, with 4 million fans, and was rated as the least accurate left-wing page. It had 9 mostly false posts out of a total of 209, accounting for 4% of its output. Just under 16% of its posts (33) were a mixture of true and false. In the end, a fifth of its posts were false or misleading, according to our analysis. Occupy Democrats' large number of fans means it theoretically has greater potential for engagement than the other pages. In the end, it did receive much higher Facebook engagement than any other page. While Freedom Daily received a median of 947 shares per post, Occupy Democrats saw a median of 10,931. One factor in its impressive engagement numbers is the fact that Occupy Democrats consistently publishes native video to its page, which is an essential element in driving significant shares, likes, and reactions on Facebook. The More Partisan or Misleading, the More Engagement 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 While the majority of the posts we rated from the partisan pages were mostly true, the mostly true posts typically did not perform as well as ones that were mostly false, were a mixture of true and false, or had no factual content. The more overtly partisan, misleading, or opinion-driven a post was, the more engagement the post would see, according to our data. Facebook, and the people using it, appears to reward the worst tendencies of these pages. 
 
 For example, Occupy Democrats saw a median of 7,755 shares for its mostly true posts, whereas all other post types received a median of 13,330 shares. Right Wing News — the largest right-wing page, at 3.3 million fans — received a median of 91 shares on its mostly true posts, and its other posts had a median of 568 shares. The mainstream political news pages we analyzed received a fraction of the engagement of the partisan pages. CNN Politics was the largest mainstream page we analyzed, with more than 1.8 million fans. It had a median of 50 shares per post during the period we analyzed, the highest number for any mainstream page. The lack of partisan content, along with an overall factual approach, may play a role in the comparably lower engagement for mainstream pages. However, there are additional important factors to consider: Mainstream pages publish with greater frequency, which means each post has less time to get traction before the next one is published; they also overwhelmingly post links, rather than mixing in a significant volume of video and photo posts, which tend to perform better on Facebook. Video and photo posts made up a significant portion of the most popular posts we analyzed. Memes and Joke Videos We were surprised by the number of posts that met our "no factual content" criteria. Almost 19% of all posts analyzed from partisan pages fell into this category. These posts were often images or memes that expressed strongly partisan opinions. Here, for example, are memes that generated big engagement for Occupy Democrats and Right Wing News: 
 
 Occupy Democrats / Right Wing News 
 
 These memes and jokes often contained some of the most partisan opinions, and often consisted of attacks against liberals or conservatives. Many of them also took the form of attacks on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or Barack Obama. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that we found posts rated "no factual content" received a very high median number of shares when compared with other post types on the partisan pages. 
 
 Humor videos also fell into this category and were the source of some of the biggest hits, particularly for left-wing pages. This Occupy Democrats scrape and repost of a Daily Show segment with Trump supporters received more than 1 million shares: 
 
 
 
 Echo Chambers and Polarization One thing we noticed when trying to fact-check posts was that these pages, and the websites connected to them, largely aggregate information from elsewhere. That wasn't surprising. What was notable was that the right-wing pages almost never used mainstream news sources, instead pointing to other highly partisan sources of information. Even if the key information they were covering originally came from a mainstream source, they almost always linked to other partisan sources, which in turn often did the same. 
 
 BuzzFeed News 
 
 For example, Right Wing News published and shared a story with the headline "NFL Boycott In FULL EFFECT! 44% Of Americans Will Stop Watching Football If Players Continue To Kneel… [VIDEO]." Its article linked to a story from Young Conservatives, which in turn linked to a Breitbart story, which itself was an aggregation of a poll conducted by Yahoo. 
 
 This was a contrast with the left-wing pages, which frequently pointed to articles from mainstream sources. Some may view this as validation of the long-held view of conservatives that mainstream media has a liberal bias. It's also important to note that the right-wing pages we analyzed had a much higher percentage of false and misleading information compared to the mainstream and left-wing pages. 
 
 Based on our analysis, we found the hyperpartisan right-wing echo chamber to be more polarized than its counterpart on the left, and our sense is that this likely contributes to the tendency for right-wing Facebook pages to promote false and misleading information. Devoted readers of these pages likely experience a version of the same echo chamber effect. The more they read and engage with these pages, the more Facebook will show them this content in their News Feeds. The more they click on the hyperpartisan websites, the more Google will show them search results from these sources. The result is that over time people will likely become more polarized because algorithms and friends continue to feed them information that pushes them further in this direction. This "group polarization" phenomenon is well-documented and has been shown to exist in studies of Facebook users. The group of BuzzFeed News reporters who conducted this analysis found that in just a few days, our News Feeds and search results began to shift and align with the type of content we were checking. "The most interesting thing is that after a few days of fact-checking right-wing pages, my Google results started skewing to right-wing sites," said one team member. The reality is that people who frequent these hyperpartisan pages on the right and on the left exist in completely different segments of the online world, rarely interacting with or seeing what the other side is seeing. The more they rely on these pages for information, the more polarized they will likely become — and the more their worldviews will be based on information that is misleading or completely false.
– Some think the shady political memes, questionable quotes, and links to eyebrow-raising stories that proliferated on social media throughout the election may have had a significant impact on the actual outcome of the election. Except for someone who happens to know social media pretty well. "Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way—I think [it's] a pretty crazy idea," Mark Zuckerberg shrugged Thursday, per the Verge. "Voters make decisions based on their lived experience." And the Facebook chief—speaking at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., per Forbes—laid out a few reasons for why he feels this way. He cited a "profound lack of empathy" by those who insist other people voted only because of fake news. "If you believe that, then I don't think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election," he said, per the Verge. He also noted there were fake, misleading, or inaccurate Hillary Clinton-leaning articles as well on social media (though a BuzzFeed probe from October found nearly double the number of iffy posts on "hyperpartisan" right-wing sites than on left-wing ones). Zuckerberg also denied Facebook's algorithm creates an "echo chamber" that puts roadblocks up to receiving a diverse mix of information. One "hard truth" he did acknowledge: People just don't click on articles that appear to conflict with their own beliefs. "We just tune out [and] I don't know what to do about that," he admitted.