The Russians did not tell Hillary Clinton to send surrogates to Arizona shortly before the election, when they would have been far more helpful in Michigan or Wisconsin. They didn’t tell her to give a speech at Goldman Sachs for $225,000 in the wake of a huge bank bailout or call half Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables”. Facebook hadn’t been invented when she was for the Iraq war before she was against it, or when she was against gay marriage before she was for it.The problem is that people are too busy blaming the Russians for problems which existed without them.
Social media platforms, nefarious bots and dodgy data companies can amplify views that are already out there and distort perspectives that already exist – but they cannot invent them. In short they can manipulate the supply of ideas, but they cannot create the demand for those ideas from thin air. (source)
While Hillary Clinton may have played a part in my voting Green: her being the Democratic candidate was not the main factor. I've gone through the series of events which made me not want to vote for "the lesser of two evils", but vote for someone who represents my political leanings in quite a few posts (especially this one).
Seriously, if the Russians were indeed responsible, then they have infiltrated the US political system to a level where only a serious purge could remove them.
