Facebook Inc, facing withering criticism for failing to stem a flood of phony news articles in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, is taking a series of steps to weed out hoaxes and other types of false information, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Friday evening.

But in his Friday posting Zuckerberg struck a decidedly different tone. He said Facebook has been working on the issue of misinformation for a long time, calling the problem complex both technically and philosophically.


"While the percentage of misinformation is relatively small, we have much more work ahead on our roadmap," Zuckerberg said.

He outlined a series of steps that were already underway, including greater use of automation to "detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves."