Some will say the Russians didn't force Americans to vote either way, but they are wrong.
Putin is a former counter-intelligence officer of the KGB and KGB fingerprints are all over this. And why would Putin back Trump? Not only because of Trump's own Russian connections , but his hopeless susceptibility to flattery - Yet another useful Putin fool in a growing list of useful Putin fools.
The meddling was done with a specific purpose to HURT OUR CANDIDATE ...
-by spreading disinformation or "Dezinformatsiya."- This ruled online from false memes, to fake stories which were shared tens of thousands more times than the snopes , factcheck.org and politifact articles desperately trying to keep up with their fact checking. Then the factcheckers were attacked as "liberal" and "clinton media stooges". All the articles had a common theme - Obama, and by extension Clinton, are part of the "evil" American establishment and need to be destroyed. Every fake conspiracy theory got traction, shared by the gullible and ignorant.
-by hacking clinton staffers and leaking campaign emails: bound to be embarrassing - as David Axelrod mused in a tweet after the first dump. The DNC was specifically targeted. Assange was only too happy to oblige and ignored basic curation and journalistic standards with a massive dump which he, via his organization, turned into memes and "ads". Our media had to report on the dump and were sometimes just as reckless- with no 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand verification. And so we saw the second massive attack - against our journalistic standards.
Zeynep Tufekci noted
"Whistle-blowing, as Mr. Ellsberg did, is a time-honored means for exposing the secret machinations of the powerful. But the release of huge amounts of hacked data, with no apparent oversight or curation, does the opposite. Such leaks threaten our ability to dissent by destroying privacy and unleashing a glut of questionable information that functions, somewhat unexpectedly, as its own form of censorship, rather than as a way to illuminate the maneuverings of the powerful.
The victims here are not just Mr. Podesta and the people in his contacts list who are embarrassed or compromised. The victim of leaks of private communication is the ability of dissidents to function in a democracy.
Demanding transparency from the powerful is not a right to see every single private email anyone in a position of power ever sent or received. WikiLeaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a Clinton Foundation employee had attempted suicide; news outlets repeated the report.
Wanton destruction of the personal privacy of any person who has ever come near a political organization is a vicious but effective means to smother dissent. This method is so common in Russia and the former Soviet states that it has a name: “kompromat,” releasing compromising material against political opponents. Emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful. Kompromat does not have to go after every single dissident to work: If you know that getting near politics means that your personal privacy may be destroyed, you will understandably stay away."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/opinion/what-were-missing-while-we-obsess-over-john-podestas-email.html
-by hacking into registration databases ( reported in October I believe) which could have possibly led to the purging of votes...
This is fucking serious, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.