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Posted: 2016-11-16T14:38:46Z | Updated: 2016-11-16T15:21:31Z

No news is good news, the old saying goes. But fake news isnt. In the echo chamber of social media, outright lies can go viral as easily as fact-checked reporting.

Just dont ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to care. He has dismissed as pretty crazy the idea that fake news spread on his site could have affected the presidential election.

He also claimed that 99 percent of the stories circulated on Facebook are factually accurate, which is itself a questionable data point .

Some of Facebooks employees appear to be taking the issue a bit more seriously. A group of anonymous workers informed BuzzFeed News on Monday that theyd formed a renegade internal task force to combat fake news.

Its not a crazy idea, one employee said. Whats crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season.

One example of fake news is this anti-Hillary Clinton story from the faux Denver Guardian, which declared in all caps: FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.

Everything about the article was made up, from the city where the crime supposedly occurred (there is no Walkerville, Maryland), to the quote from Walkerville Police Chief Pat Frederick. (A town with a similar spelling Walkersville does exist, but doesnt even have a police department.)

The story was so egregious that The Denver Post, an actual legitimate news source with a reputation to uphold, felt it had to run its own article denying any connection to the fake news whatsoever: