Facebook will take measures to combat fake news - Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to rid Facebook of fake news stories, which critics claim have an effect on how users of the social network vote in elections - most recently in Donald Trump's victory last week over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential race.

Trump triumphed over Clinton after a tumultuous campaign which saw both candidates trade insults and accusations in the direction of their opponent, and Zuckerberg has had to defend the social network's role in perpetuating false stories.

The Facebook founder denied that his company had any role in the outcome of the election but in a post published on his personal page, Zuckerberg said he hoped to implement measures to prevent "hoax" stories in the near future.

"We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news," he wrote. "We hope to have more to share soon, although this work often takes longer than we'd like in order to confirm changes we make won't introduce unintended side effects or bias into the system."

Although it has been found that an increasing number of people now use Facebook as primary source of news coverage, with new research finding nearly half of Americans get their news from the social media site, Zuckerberg said it was "extremely unlikely" that any hoax news had any bearing on the defeat of Hillary Clinton, saying over 99% of news stories on the site were authentic.

"Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. 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."

One thing the site's newsfeed has been shown to do is create a "filter bubble" or information cocoon that reinforces existing or emerging personal views without injecting enough different opinions, as the feed is specifically designed to show users content it thinks will be of most interest.

Zuckerberg also added that Facebook actually improved the democratic process in the US by allowing more people to vote and become better informed about the candidates.

"Overall, I am proud of our role giving people a voice in this election...Most importantly, we gave tens of millions of people tools to share billions of posts and reactions about this election. A lot of that dialog may not have happened without Facebook."

An example of a fake story that gained wide attention was a report that stated Pope Francis was supporting Donald Trump, shared around a million times on Facebook, but completely untrue.