Don’t credit Facebook fake stories for Donald Trump victory: Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said fake stories on the social networking website did not play a role in Donald Trump's victory.

Sandberg said the impact of the fake stories was overstated. Even though she said it was an important issue, she added that it did not sway the election.

Since Donald Trump's emphatic victory against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, some have blamed fake stories on Facebook for influencing election results. While such claims do belittle the GOP leader's performance in the presidential election, the Facebook executive comes forward to defend the president-elect.

Sandberg was on TODAY as she spoke about Facebook's role in dealing with fake stories. According to her, Facebook takes the responsibility to handle fake stories quite seriously. The company is collaborating with third parties in its efforts to label fake news stories. Facebook is already taking measures to find out hoax stories.

At the same time, she agreed that there were many more important things to do.

"We know that people don't want to see hoaxes on Facebook, and we don't want to see hoaxes on Facebook," Sandberg told on TODAY. "And so we're working on it because misinformation is something we take seriously and something we're going to continue to iterate on the service."

It has been a grave challenge to differentiate between labeling fake news and freedom of expression. In November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about taking steps to improve the website's capability to find out misinformation.

Zuckerberg said in his post that a "relatively small" percentage of posts was dedicated to misinformation, NBC News reported. He also said that the company would like to raise its standards to decide what should appear in the news feed.

Sandberg said the process of operation to label fake news was complicated. But, the good part is that people have taken steps themselves to engage in things that matter to them.