The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent:rolleyes: researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent:rolleyes: researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute [color="Red"]*who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html

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FPRI's president is Alan Luxenberg,:jew:a longtime affiliate of the institute. Its board of trustees, as of 2013, drew heavily from Philadelphia's business and philanthropic communities, though a few well-known hawks—including Devon Gaffney Cross and former Mitt Romney advisers Dov Zakheim and John Lehman:jew:—were also members.[3] Controversial historian of Islam Bernard Lewis :jew:serves on the group's board of advisers alongside other conservative academics and think tank figures, including Michael Doran of the Brookings Institute and the Hoover Institution’s Kori Schake,:jew: who served as a senior adviser to the McCain/Palin campaign during the 2008 presidential election.[4]

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/foreign_policy_research_institute/