Obama Warned Zuckerberg About Facebook's Fake News Problem

Facebook may have fallen out of favor with the millennials and Generation Z in recent years, but it's found a new demographic: Your racist aunt and Russian trolls. You know it. I know it. And Barack Obama knows it. Apparently, the only person that wasn’t ready to admit it was the only person who could do something about it, Mark Zuckerberg. But that’s not for lack of trying.

As the great American experiment unfolded in chaos with hacks, leaks and memes on the social media, those within the U.S. intelligence community started looking into what the heck was going on. What they discovered was that, among other things, people were getting a host of bunk information about hot-button election issues on Facebook from fake accounts. And when those accounts were credited for electing Donald Trump into the White House, then-President Barack Obama decided to have a chat with the Chairman of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg.

According to the Washington Post, shortly after Trump's victory in the presidential election last November, Obama personally appealed Zuckerberg to fix Facebook’s fake news problem before it could get worse during a world leaders' summit in Lima, Peru. In response, Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged fake news as an issue, though he told Obama that it wasn't a widespread problem on Facebook and there was no easy remedy, according to sources who were briefed on their private exchange and spoke to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.

The private powwow between Obama and Zuckerberg took place just nine days after Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that Facebook may have played a role in the hacking of the U.S. election. Facebook is there for burning your Steelers jersey and arguing with some guy you went to high school with, not the undermining of U.S. democracy. In fact, if you remember, Zuckerberg called the idea “crazy.”

“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," said Mark Zuckerberg during a tech conference following the November 8th election. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

What wasn’t crazy to Zuckerberg, however, was noticing the shadowy hands of Russian meddling, way back in June 2016, contacting the F.B.I and then failing to fix the issue.

The latest revelations about Zuckerberg and Obama’s meeting come just a week after Facebook agreed to hand over more than 3,000 political ads purchased by Russian-linked accounts during the 2016 election. The company acknowledged that they had found more than 470 fake accounts and pages created by a Russian company that had spent more than $100,000 on influencing U.S. voters. Zuckerberg has since gone on a brief P.R. tour about the issue, in hopes of preventing the problem from getting worse, before going back to meeting people in the heartland for what feels like the ramp up to a presidential bid.

“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” Zuckerberg said in a video on Facebook. “We are actively working with the U.S. Government on its ongoing investigations into Russian interference."

We'll have to wait until 2020 to see if Facebook is serious about their fight on fake news or whether they think the only thing cooler than a million fake news accounts is a billion fake news accounts.