Facebook is really, seriously working on its fake news problem

Facebook can't escape criticism about its role in distributing "fake news." Confronted with what you might call a gentle probing on The Today Show on Thursday, a top exec said the company is "working on it." 

"We've been working on this for a long time, and we've taken important steps, but there's a lot more to do," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told Today anchor Savannah Guthrie. "We're working on it, because misinformation is something we take seriously and something we're going to continue iterating on the surface."

But Sandberg maintains the party line that her product, a social network with 1.79 billion monthly users and a major destination for media consumption, couldn't have influenced the presidential election.

"There have been claims that it swayed the election, and we don't think it swayed the election, but we take that responsibility very seriously," Sandberg said.

When Sandberg says Facebook has been working on the spread of hoaxes "for a long time," she means it. The social network has released public statements about misleading information dating back to at least August 2014.

Any "important steps" Facebook has taken in the past didn't stop the viral spread of totally fake news this election season. An analysis from BuzzFeed News found that "hyper partisan," Trump-supporting fake news was shared at a considerably higher rate than left-leaning hoaxes.

Just one fake news article can be shared to millions of people, Mashable found, to say nothing of the potential impact of many articles distributed by several different outlets.

Sure, we can't say that fake news certainly influenced voter behavior. But we do know that it's enough to motivate violence.