US election results are out and for most of the world it is quite a shocker. That Donald J Trump would emerge victorious, was not an expected outcome. It has also been acknowledged that for most Americans this was a bitterly divided election. And while the post-election analysis will continue, the role of Facebook and Twitter and social media in general has come under scatching criticism and scrutiny for its role in this election.

Facebook’s ‘Fake News’ problem was something that even Obama acknowledged just days before the election. At a campaign in rally in Michigan, the now out-going US President had this to say, “The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal… As long as it is on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as it’s on social media, people start believing it, and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.”

What Obama is referring to isn’t new. Facebook and fake news have been an issue for sometime now, and it is not isolated to the US. In India too, fake and unverified news articles with sensation claims will trend faster and for days. False news reports around how an FBI officer investigating Clinton’s emails had died, malicious reports about Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin, claims of how 88 US generals were defying Hillary Clinton, and many more trended and were shared by users on the social network.

More disturbingly, a BuzzFeed News investigation had shown how over 140 pro-Trump websites with sensational political headlines were being run by teens in Macedonia, looking to make a quick buck by increasing engagement and readership on their websites.

And it is not just a Facebook problem. On Twitter, it was being claimed Pro-Hillary voters could do so via text, which was clearly false and misleading. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself admitted they had no clue how they missed something so crucial.

In India too, we have seen fake, unverified stories trend on Facebook. When the JNU saga was unfolding, one of the first trends was ‘Shut down JNU.’ If you had no clue what this was about, you’d have been convinced that shutting down JNU was the only solution. More so another JNU student Umar Khalid was trending for days as a JEM terrorist sympathiser on Facebook; this when no official government agency had said anything of the sort. Pictures of Umar with captions like he is a terrorist, anti-India, etc were shared for many days, without any proof and Facebook didn’t take down the topic either.