The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.
The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.
Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.
First off there is plenty of evidence to support this.
Breitbart and other pro-Trump media outlets parroted everything that the Russian hackers released, sometimes at the very same time as Russian news outlets, or even before.
What's more the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, also quoted from those Right Wing Pravda sites and pushed their conspiracy theories and misinformation out to the public.
Personally I expect to see new evidence revealed that not only did the Right Wing news sites collude with the Russians, but that the Trump campaign did as well.
Source http://ift.tt/2tNqRGv
