【Han Yi-seul-I (한이슬) Archives】

Facebook has repeatedly insistedthat it's not a media company. On Friday,Han Yi-seul-I (한이슬) Archives it bought one of the most powerful Facebook-focused pieces of software that media companies use to`do their jobs.

CrowdTangle, a tool that publishers use to track how their stories spread through the internet, said Friday that it had been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum.

Facebook already has its own tools that let publishers track how their pages perform, but CrowdTangle can track other sites, like Facebook-owned Instagram, Twitter and Reddit.

You can blame CrowdTangle if you feel like news sites often post the same stories. When its software tells publishers that a topic is trending, many outlets scramble to cover it at once.

CrowdTangle can also be used to track false news stories. Throughout the presidential election and beforehand, a never-ending cycle of blatantly false stories, or ones exaggerated beyond belief from every ideology circulated on Facebook, as chronicled by John Herrman at the New York Times.

Several journalists, including Herrman, Buzzfeed's Alex Kantrowitz and Mashable's own Damon Beres said they used CrowdTangle in order to track how false news spreads on the platform.

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There's a chance that Facebook will use CrowdTangle along with its existing social listening tools to try and combat fake news. That would presume the company is willing to accept the responsibilities of a media company, despite near-constant claims from its executives that the company is anything but.

"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea," the Facebook CEO reportedly told the crowd at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, California on Thursday.

"Voters make decisions based on their lived experience," he said.

The problem with that kind of logic is that Facebook is our lived experience.

Facebook's massive influence

Facebook is unprecedented information behemoth. It's the most powerful and centralized information system in the history of mankind.

A Pew Research Center study releasedFriday revealed that seventy-nine percent of American adults who use the internet are on Facebook, and 76 percent of them use it every day.

Previous research from Pew indicates that most Americans already receive their news from social media, and 20 percent of American social media users indicated that they've changed their views "on a political or social issue" because of something they saw on sites like Facebook.

What Facebook needs to do now is admit that it’s a media company and take responsibility for how false information spreads on its platform.

Facebook already behaves like a news outlet does

Media companies decide what information should be spread, report it and distribute it. While Facebook doesn’t directly create content, its automated News Feed decides what’s most important, and circulates that information to its users.

"The world needs news companies, but also technology platforms, like what we do, and we take our role in this very seriously," Zuckerberg reiterated againin August.

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Facebook already makes many of the editorial decisions that media companies do. For example, in October, it decidedto allow more types of graphic or offensive content if deemed "important to the public interest."

Every day, Facebook goes to great lengths to make sure its site is free from content that violates its community standards, which is hard to distinguish as different from a media company deciding what kinds of stories it wants to publish.

Facebook does have a mechanism for reporting fake news stories, but it’s clear that it has not been enough to tackle the platform's fake news problem.

When a piece of content claiming that President Obama is secretly gay appears in the same format alongside a New York Times investigative piece, it becomes difficult to tell the difference.

Facebook once had a small editorial team that helped decide what topics should appear on its Trending feature, but it fired its members earlier this year after they were accused of suppressing conservative stories. A number of hoaxes then began to appear in the Trending sidebar. It's now controlled by an algorithm and a small technical staff.

For the past two years, Facebook admitted at least four different times that its platform had a problem with misleading clickbait and hoaxes.

Most recently in August, the company said "We also work to understand what kinds of stories people find misleading and spammy to help make sure people see less."

Zuckerberg continues to tell the world that Facebook isn't a media company because if he did, he would need to address the reality that it has led millions of people to believe in fantastical, counterfeit narratives about their fellow citizens and the country they live in.