Title: How Russia hacked American voters.
Headings: Russia Didn’t Hack the U.S. Election
Russia Didn’t Hack the U.S. Election
It hacked the voters.

Content: They also fueled the heat she took for separate issues, like classified emails on her private server or questions about the Clinton Foundation, which only added to the sense that she wasn’t being straight with the American people. This perception of her contributed to strikingly high unfavorability ratings and helps explain why nearly half of registered voters who supported Trump proclaimed that they were actually voting against Clinton. Advertisement
Then there was the fake news. These fabricated stories ranged from purported admissions that Clinton was paying people $3,500 to protest at Trump rallies to a supposed declaration by the pope that he supported Donald Trump. These stories questioned Clinton’s health, reported a murder-suicide of an FBI agent involved in the Clinton email leaks, and placed a Trump-Pence campaign sign in the yard of FBI Director James Comey. Advertisement
Reporting has shown that Russian propaganda is likely behind the intentional spread of such stories, even when it wasn’t the originator. These stories showed up at the top of search engine results and were shared on social media sites, which have increasingly become echo chambers for our personal politics. Trump campaign officials amplified some of these stories on social media, and even traditional media outlets were fooled on occasion. Analysis since the election has shown that fake news stories outperformed real news by the end of the campaign, and most Americans, but especially Trump voters, tended to believe the fake stories to be true. Russia set out to intentionally manipulate the information that voters consumed in order to influence the decisions they made on Election Day.