For those of you on Facebook, do you believe all the news stories you see? Do you read all the news stories you see, and if not how do you determine which ones you read?

I ask that for two reasons: 1. I’m not on Facebook, and 2. Stories about its news feeds are all over the place right now.

At the end of last week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg came out and said the website’s news feeds didn’t influence the election, this after stories earlier in the week claimed or insinuated the news feeds did just that. Who’s to say one way or another? All I know is there are reporters here who said they’ve had to point out to people on Facebook that a particular story wasn’t true. That doesn’t mean those stories influenced anything … but it also doesn’t mean they didn’t.

This week BuzzFeed News had a story about how it used analytics and discovered that fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets; the analysis covered the final three months of the presidential election. The top 20 fake news stories generated more than 1 million more shares than the real news. BuzzFeed News said until the last three months the major news outlets “easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook.”

I think part of that difference might have been that until the last three months there still was some doubt about the candidates running for president. Sure, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had earned enough delegates to win their respective party’s nomination, but there were reports that prior to both national conventions there would be challenges. Once the candidates were set then the battle to discredit each other was on full steam ahead.

The top five mainstream election stories three months before the election according to BuzzFeed News: “Trump’s History of Corruption is Mind-Boggling. So Why is Clinton Supposedly the Corrupt One?,” “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton,” “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos from Racy Shoot Revealed,” “Ford Fact Checks Trump: We Will Be Here Forever,” and “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

The top five fake election stories three months before the election: “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement,” “WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS … Then Drops Another BOMBSHELL,” “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined,” “Just Read the Law: Hillary Is Disqualified From Holding Any Federal Office,” and “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.”

According to the BuzzFeed News analytics, the top two fake news stories were about the pope endorsing Trump and Clinton selling weapons to ISIS, which is kind of odd because those are probably the two most obvious fake stories if someone put their mind to what they meant. Ending the Fed website was responsible for four of the top five stories and also was behind the fake story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News in August.

So, did those fakes stories really influence the election? Were people reading all those fake stories and blindly believing them, resulting in their opinions being swayed? And what about the real news stories, what role did they or did they not play?

This was a nasty, contentious election campaign going all the way back to the early announcements. It also was the first election played out to this degree on social media where every word, action, sneeze and burp was recorded and “interpreted” for its significance about the candidate.

Make no mistake, some of the fake news likely played a role in how people voted, but to what degree we’ll never really know (and maybe we don’t want to know). But certainly most people saw it as entertainment, right?

The bigger question is this: Is it going to get better or worse by 2020? We can’t predict what social media will look like four years from now. There likely will be other forms of social media people rely on.

There’s an ad for the Citi Double Cash Card where a couple says all things people don’t say on dates when the date was lousy. The tagline is: Wouldn’t it be great if everyone said what they meant? Maybe there will be an app to decipher campaign speeches, stories and polls by 2020. Like John Lennon sang “You may say I’m dreamer, but I’m not the only one. …”

Steve Murch can be reached via email at smurch@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5686. Follow Steve on Twitter @sm_alpenanews. Read his blog, Pardon, Me But … at www.thealpenanews.com.