Yahoo News Facebook says Zuckerberg's controversial election posts deleted by 'mistake'
Curious about what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the election? On Monday, you could go to his profile page to find out. Tuesday? Not so much.
As spotted by The Verge, Zuckerberg's statements about the election and spread of misinformation on Facebook vanished from his profile page Tuesday morning. Mashable confirmed that they were gone, though they later reappeared.
SEE ALSO: Facebook failed America this year — now it should kill the News Feed
"These posts were removed by mistake," a spokesman for Facebook told Mashable. "This was caused by an error in one of our systems and the posts have now been restored. Mark's account was not compromised, and he stands behind the words in his posts."
The glitch supposedly affected around 10 updates posted to Zuckerberg's profile in the past two months, though Facebook would not provide any specific information about the glitch or which other posts were temporarily deleted. Several posts from around the same time were intact while the election posts were missing.
For what it's worth, Facebook has blamed a "technical glitch" for missing content before — most notably in July, when live video from the Philando Castile shooting was temporarily removed from the social network.
Video footage from the Techonomy conference on Nov. 10, in which Zuckerberg called the idea that fake news influenced the election "pretty crazy," remained live on Facebook Tuesday. You can see it below:
Facebook has recently faced tremendous backlash over fake news, in no small part due to Zuckerberg's insistence that media shared on the social network wouldn't have influenced voter behavior.
"Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes," Zuckerberg wrote in one of the deleted Facebook posts. "The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other."
Facebook has thus far not explained what "authentic" content is, or how it's measured that almost all of the material seen by users is such.
Earlier this month, the company said it would cut off ad revenue to sites spreading misinformation.
Meanwhile, 76 percent of online Americans use Facebook every day, while 20 percent of social media users say they've shifted their stance on a political issue because of something they saw on a site like Facebook, according to two separate surveys from the Pew Research Center.
UPDATE: Nov. 29, 2016, 1:52 p.m. EST This article has been updated with a statement from Facebook.
UPDATE: Nov. 29, 2016, 2:47 p.m. EST This article has been updated with new information from Facebook.
