Is Facebook to blame for fake news? Yes, but not in the sense you think...

Americans think big tech companies need more government regulation, a new poll found today.

Among other reasons, the Axios-SurveyMonkey poll found that "more than eight in 10 — including big majorities across party lines — blame the technology companies for not doing more to safeguard their platforms against election interference."

Remember all those "Russia hacked the election" claims? Well, apparently Americans now think Facebook is to blame.

To be fair though, Mark Zuckerberg may have brought this on himself. He went on video after the election with his somber face, detailing how Facebook was taking these claims with deadly seriousness. One got the impression that he was simultaneously admitting Facebook pivoted the election, and promising that immediate steps would be taken to prevent this from happening again.

Then the details of this "election hacking" of Facebook came out.

It turns out that users in Russia spent less than $100,000 total on US political ads in 2016.

And just look at these ads––how could an LGBT group's rainbow-tinted ad for a muscly Bernie Sanders coloring book not have influenced the election?

Keep in mind, the total ad spend for Trump and Clinton was $81 million.

Oh, one other thing––Facebook's VP of Advertising Rob Goldman said the majority of that tiny (but FABULOUS!) Russian ad spend was after the election.

In that same tweet, Goldman blasted the media for not reporting this fact.

Then again, hysteria over Russia is good business for the likes of CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times––as journalist Glenn Greenwald has relentlessly pointed out. After Facebook played this non-story up, they shouldn't have been surprised at the selective reporting when they tried to tone it down.

The real irony here is that for all of Facebook's efforts to ostensibly crack down on Internet fake news, a fake story at least partly of its own making is now driving public opinion for it to face stricter regulation.