Sheryl Sandberg: Fake News Didn’t Sway Elections

Sheryl Sandberg. Image by Getty

By Nathan Guttman December 8, 2016

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is pushing back against claims that fake news disseminated on the company’s pages helped Donald Trump win the election.

“We don’t think it swayed the election,” Sandberg told NBC’s Today Show, “but we take that responsibility really seriously.”

Fake news, or made-up stories, conspiracies and accusations, came to attention following the November 8 elections. Democrats claimed Trump and his supporters spread fabricated reports on Facebook and Twitter to smear their rivals and influence voters.

Facebook came under fire for not filtering fake news and causing users to believe these posts were just as reliable as reports coming from credible news outlets.

“We’ve been working on this for a long time and we’ve taken important steps but there’s a lot more to do,” Sandberg said. “We know that people don’t want to see hoaxes on Facebook and we don’t want to see hoaxes on Facebook and so we’re working on it because misinformation is something we take seriously.”

Sandberg spoke Thursday. She has said growing up in the BBYO Jewish youth movement shaped her identity as a Jewish woman.

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO