A year ago I was part of a digital marketing team at a tech company. We were maybe the fifth largest company in our particular industry, which was drones. But we knew how to game Google, and our site was maxed out. We did our research and geared the content for the major keywords that we knew people used most frequently when they were shopping for drones or researching drones or looking for drone video. We knew our audience: their buying habits, their interests, ages, geography, etc., and soon our Google results were up there with a company that was literally an order of magnitude bigger than we were. A few months later, we were beating them at Google.

Our sales reflected this nearly immediately, but perhaps more importantly, we were perceived as being much bigger and more influential than we actually were. It was unfair and fair at the same time. It's just how that game is played, everywhere.

But then the giants wised up, poured a ton of people and money into it and squashed us.

Thing is, it doesn't take all that much to do what we did. Ask any digital marketer. You just need a little experience and a whole lot of time and money. I'm not going to get into the weeds of SEO (search engine optimization). But I am going to say something that sounds completely insane, and warn you that we're in the middle of something we've never experienced in America: a full-on psychological war. And Google, of all places, is a main battlefield.

I'm going to show you one specific weapon in this war that's being used against you and me and the United States right now: Google. There are other information weapons, such as bots and fake news sites, but other stories have those pretty well covered. But before we get started, though, two things to keep in mind:

First, most of us don't even know we're in this war yet. You don't know when you've been wounded, when you've been killed. And that's the whole point: You're not supposed to.

Second, the attacks in this war aren't aimed at your enemies. You attack your own side.

Independence Is Division

First: Why this is important. Why this is a war.

Google, whether you're aware of it or not, is a total slaughterhouse. Trump's data team (he's reportedly set up a "war room" to combat the Russia story) has weaponized information, and for about a year now has been slaying American brains: Trump supporters' brains. It started with the election, then died down, but now it's coming back, vengeful and desperate.

As a result, we're at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

This is, of course, about the truth, and about the cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities of Americans. This is nothing new for propagandists. What's different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

I can describe it in no other terms but a war.

The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself. If I think about this for too long I grow terrified and want to take everyone's computer away. But it might be too late.

The past few days, we've seen some good reporting about the surge of Trump bots on social media. (Bots are automated, non-human accounts.) And though he didn't, as some people have claimed, net five million new Twitter followers in three days (though he did gain three million in May), nearly half of his followers, a full 49 percent, aren't real people.

That's right: Trump is being followed by 15 million robots.

The Washington Post just ran a pretty cowardly piece about Trump's bot following. They titled it "Something Fishy Is Going on with Trump's Twitter Account," but didn't say why this fishiness mattered in the first place. Who really cares if his followers are fake? So what if he wears a Twitter toupee? (A Twoupee, if you will.) We're used to that from Trump.

Here's where WaPo wouldn't, for some reason, go: those bots aren't just digital codpieces. They're attack vectors for weaponized information. What does that mean?

Misinfotainment

When we think about the Russian attacks during the election, most of us probably think of the DNC hacks, Podesta, and the steady drips from WikiLeaks of that stolen information. If you hate Hillary Clinton, I'm sure that at some point in the past nine months you've said something like, "Well, who cares how that information got out there, it's the truth!"

I won't argue. Instead, I'd like to point out that's not the whole story. According not just to me and FAKE NEWS! reports, but to the declassified U.S. intelligence report on Russian subversion in the 2016 election, the attacks included weaponizing false information (what "fake news" really is: stuff that's entirely made up; pure fiction) and creating real-seeming sites to host this fake news. So no, the whole hacking effort was not just publishing "the truth" about Clinton. Much of it was publishing fake news. Or, perhaps more dangerously, misleading news.

This brings us to Google today. A couple weeks ago I saw an insane person on my Facebook feed screaming about how Obama had leaked classified information about the Bin Laden raid that got people killed. What the fuck? I'd never heard anything about this, and the raid was six years ago, and this guy was a total right-wing crackpot, which is the trifecta for guaranteeing at least fifteen full minutes of batshit conspiracy theory misinfotainment. So I duly Googled "obama classified information bin laden." If you do that right now, here's what you get.

WHAAAAAT?! Obama's mouth killed people! Media is libturd hypocrites!

Let's ignore the criminal level of stupidity for a minute. Look instead at the dates on those articles. May 16 and 17 of this year. This year. The Bin Laden raid, again, was six fucking years ago. What's happening here? Why are all these different white nationalist news sites suddenly writing about this together? Why did they start doing it on May 16? Why do those articles even exist?

Well, on May 15, you might remember, The Washington Post broke this little gem: President Trump shared top secret intel with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador. In the Oval Office. In front of Russian state media.

Whoops-a-daisy!

The right-wing bullshit factory lurched to life. These outlets launched a broad "what about?" attack, a coordinated attack, on Obama and the left. That bullshit story about Obama's "dangerous" classified "leak" suddenly broke throughout the right-wing media sphere. Some of these articles are even cut-and-paste jobs. There's no effort here, just content. Tons of content, made quickly, made together, all spewing the same lies, but optimized.

But if you'll notice the bottom of that results page, there's a single redeeming link: PolitiFact. Thing is, it's at the bottom. But Alexa, a service that ranks all websites around the world based on their traffic, ranks PolitiFact much higher (~10,000) than the hit just above it, "trumptrainnews.com" (~128,000). Shouldn't such a gap work in PolitiFact's favor?

It doesn't. And it doesn't work in your favor, either.

Let Me Google That for You

Now let's see exactly what's up here. Together, we're going to Google the phrase "trump no evidence collusion." (And because Google searches change over time, I'll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump's data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump's war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more about this crazyAF, richAF, crackpot genius with a heart of shit.

Before we begin, though, we need to establish the fact that this statement is a lie: "There's no evidence of collusion!" The reason I'm using this specific example is because this highly nuanced claim is the perfect loophole to exploit for misinformation, to shade the truth as lie and get away with it clean.

The truth: no one in the intelligence community and no one on any of the Congressional committees looking into this thing, be they Democrat or Republican, none of them have said categorically, flat-out, "There is no evidence of collusion." Period. People investigating the case will only go so far as to say they haven't seen any evidence. Or that there hasn't been any evidence made available to them yet. But they don't ever say there flat-out isn't any evidence of collusion. Ever. Read this if you don't believe me.

Back to the Googs. Here's what I saw when I Googled "trump no evidence collusion" on the afternoon of May 29.

How many mainstream sites do you see on the first page? Zero. Let's go to page two.

Ah! There, buried under InfoWars and National Review and The Blaze and not one, not two, but three pieces from The Free Beacon, we finally find good old Reuters! And, lo: the good old Washington Post! And what about The Failing New York Times? Truly failing. Here's page three:

Uh. Page four?

Nope. The New York Fucking Times doesn't pop up until page five. Ahead of it: Lifezette; Talking Points Memo; The Blaze; The Daily Caller; something called ntknetwork; constitution.com; GOP.com; GatewayPundit; the aptly named NewsBusters; TownHall.com; and, kings of kings, Breitbart and InfoWars.

And when I googled the search term the night of May 31, as I'm writing this, it's even worse. The Washington Post, which had a page two hit on May 29, is now at the bottom of page four.

Now, to state the obvious, the way those results are ordered isn't exactly organic. Alexa ranks the NYT at 120 globally; WaPo at 190. Now, what about the illustrious townhall.com, which had not one but two hits on page one? It's ranked at 9,109. In other words, those first four pages (four full pages of synchronized bullshit) are evidence of a massive and centrally managed strategic misinformation campaign being waged on your brain.

These dozens of sites are all peddling the same lie with articles published at the same time. So if you wondered whether there really was collusion and wanted to dig into the Googs to get your story straight, you'd be overwhelmed by four fucking pages of what look like news sites telling you that even Democrats say there's flat-out no evidence of collusion. So why the fuck, you ask, are we wasting our time and resources attacking poor, duly-elected President Trump on false pretenses?

But again, the truth of this statement is trickier. No? Funnily enough, even these crackpot websites agree. Here are a few screenshots. If you read closely (which they're betting you won't) they all include the proper, honest caveats: no evidence YET; no one says they've SEEN evidence; etc. I've highlighted them here so you can get a feel for their strategic invisibility: you don't notice the quiet spot for all the noise around it.

See? You'd either miss this caveat altogether, or you'd forget about it or write it off as meaningless or some kind of error. It's so small, after all. This is completely forgivable: It's a human vulnerability. I exhibit it. Everyone does. We want to be right. We trust our brains. We believe in ourselves, in our capacity to execute sound, independent judgment. But this is the very thing that's being strategically exploited on a truly massive scale. This is a scheme to generate an overwhelming amount of misinformation, not just to combat a more nuanced truth, but to marginalize the truth, to weaken it, to BURY it underneath your own misplaced convictions about yourself.

We're being flattered into stupidity.

Here's how it works.

First: Create content that subtly masks the truth.
Second: Shape that content into something people will share.
Third: Make it identical, and make a ton of it.
Fourth: Flood the internet with that content.
Fifth: Flood the internet with that content.
Six: Flood the fucking internet with that content.

The Google algorithm orders its search results, among other ways, by popular keywords used, publish date, and how many other links point to your site. You can do things to max out your keyword SEO, like I did in my last job, but the results we're seeing here, their consistency, the thoroughness of their victory, and the standardization of the messaging all requires a well-funded, well-coordinated effort. Ask any digital marketing expert: This is an organization of writers and data geeks who are paid handsomely to spend all day churning out content, pointing readers from one site to another, and using social media bots as vectors to beam this misinformation out to micro-targeted demographics.

It's a truly amazing operation. Time Magazine did an outstanding piece of reporting on this quite recently. So did The Guardian, here. Those pieces will scare the shit out of you. If they don't, I'm afraid you're an unwitting casualty of this war.

Why aren't Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven't learned.

How it works? Begin with some research. Find out which keywords people are using most frequently to dig up the kinds of stories you want to warp and feed them. Words like evidence; Trump; collusion; Comey; Clapper; Yates; Russia; etc. Then create an alternate narrative that deflects from the mainstream news and that can work independently of time: One you can bring back whenever you need it. Some examples: Benghazi; emails; Butobama.

Now, importantly, we need to make it highly shareable. Why do people tell other people things? Because they want to inform them, meaning ultimately they want to feel and look smart. You can flatter people into thinking they're smart by offering "new" information that "the other side" is hiding or not covering at all. You can flatter them into ignorance in the name of independence, flatter them into stupidity in the name of being smart.

That kind of content, as proven, will spread like wildfire.

Now sync that messaging across a shit-ton of "news" sites. Link to each other. Max out that SEO. Drop a ton of money into adsense. Create as much synchronized content around your keywords as possible. Then publish. Then update and publish again. And again. And again.

Because time also matters.

Take one of those townhall.com page one hits, for instance. As mentioned earlier, I first noticed this bullshit on May 29. I'm writing this at about 10:30 p.m.-ish on May 31, yet this search result shows that the townhall.com article about the evidence of collusion is now only one day old. Here's a screenshot of the same search terms, current time and date up at the top. Behold! James Clapper has become unstuck in time:

Why do these stories keep showing up? Well, they're not exactly the same stories. These sites are so shitty and unpopular that the stories would drop off almost immediately if left to their own devices. So the sites must continually update/rewrite/tweak/republish again and again so the Google algorithm thinks they're new. (Google also prioritizes newness.)

And look: James Clapper's testimony was weeks ago, yet these articles read like they're breaking a new story. And they're only a few hours old. The Post and the Times, however, aren't spending their resources on this stuff. They have responsibilities to keep up with the real news. And so do we, as citizens. But these psycho-dipshit crawlspaces don't have that burden, and they're betting you don't want it, either.

The Burden

I want to remind you, at the end of this technical stuff, that we're talking about something critical: How our brains work determines how our tribes are formed and behave, which determines how our society functions, or doesn't.

Because check this out: Who do these weapons target? These sites are havens for people who already support Trump or who already hate the left. The psychological weapon of misinformation is therefore perhaps unique in that it's intended primarily for use against your "allies," to further entrench or indoctrinate them in your camp.

The result? The American psyche is being transformed. Truthfully, it already has been. We've entered a new political, philosophical, social, and cultural era. People don't seem to understand yet, or aren't willing to face it, but reality is completely malleable. Even in America.

After all, the only things that can be true to you (that is, capital-T "True") is what you choose to believe about the world around you. You get to make that choice yourself. For some of us it's a freedom. Others a burden. Trump's crew and the right wing elite have understood this for years. Hell, the Russian people have lived with this for decades. We're no match. We're soft targets. All a propagandist has to do is link our identity to our beliefs. Once that's accomplished, your identity anchors your beliefs. But then you start to see there's this huge web of believers out there, and a common identity begins to shape up. A tribe emerges. Never mind that half of them are robots: You're not giving up who you are. And so if your beliefs define who you are, as a person and as a member of a tribe, there's nothing in the world short of an existential cataclysm that will ever, ever get you to change your mind.

If you don't want to.

Which reminds me: Ironically enough, these sheep sites bleating that there's no evidence of collusion are themselves evidence of collusion.

Buried somewhere in that Time Magazine article is a real scoop: The FBI is investigating Robert Mercer's data firm, Cambridge Analytica, along with Breitbart News for colluding with Russia to spread misinformation and manipulate the hearts and minds of micro-targeted Americans during the 2016 campaign.

The question here is, how do we react? Will we snap out of it and be able to change course, once this truth is out there on the table? Or will this truth be so painful, so humiliating, so devastating to our identities that it sends us running straight for the warmth of the barrels gunning us down?

This article by Roger Sollenberger appeared on Paste Magazine on June 1, 2017.

###

June 5, 2017

Addendum. At ReCode on June 1, 2017, Hillary spoke about how the Russian manipulation of our Electorate in 2016 was supported by/weaponized by the Trump campaign. She asserted that Only the Campaign knew how to gauge what messages against Hillary would be effective! No Russians would know that.

Hillary said she was "leaning Trump."

Here is the transcript of what I see as the relevant part of what she said. This conversation with Hillary is with Kara Swisher and Walt Mosberg.

If you are in a rush and want to see the point she made about Trump's collusion, her finger pointing is in italics below.

Yes, right. Well I hope we get into this because look, I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that's not why I lost. So I think it's important that we learn the real lessons from this last campaign because the forces that we are up against are not just interested in influencing our elections and our politics, they're going after our economy and they're going after our unity as a nation. So yes, back in '98 — look, I have been watching this and have been, obviously, the target for a number of years. And what is hard for people to really — although now after the election there's greater understanding — is that there are forces in our country — put the Russians to one side — who have been fighting rear-guard actions for as long as I've been alive, because my life coincided with the Civil Rights movement, with the Women's Rights movement, with anti-war protesting, with the impeachment ... you know, the driving out of office because he was about to be impeached president ...

Swisher: Let's be specific.

Yeah, let's be very specific as if people didn't understand what I was saying [laughter].

And let's talk about, you know, Watergate and all the stuff that we lived through. And we were on a real roll as a country despite assassinations, despite setbacks. You know, opening the doors of opportunity, expanding rights to people who never had them in any country, was frankly thrilling. And I believed then, and I believe now, that we're never done with this work. And so part of the challenge is to maintain the energy and the focus to keep going forward. But you've got to recognize the other side is never, never tired either. They're always looking to push back.

And what we saw was, in the election particularly, and I appreciate what Walt said, the first time that you had the tech revolution really weaponized politically — before it was a way to reach voters, you know, collect fundraising, do things that would help the candidate who was behind the messaging — that changed this time, and it changed for a number of reasons we should talk about. You had Citizens United come to its full fruition. So unaccountable money flowing in against me, against other Democrats, in a way that we hadn't seen and then attached to this weaponized information war. You had effective suppression of votes. Those of us who can remember the Voting Rights Act, the expansion of the franchise, and then I was in the Senate when we voted 98 to nothing under a Republican president, George W. Bush, to extend the Voting Rights Act.

And the Supreme Court said, "Oh, we don't need it anymore," throws it out, and Republican governors and legislatures began doing everything they could to suppress the vote. So, that was before we get to the Russians, or Cambridge Analitica, or anything of the outside. And there were lots of factors at work and yeah, it was aimed at me, but it's a much deeper, more persistent effort to try to literally turn the clock back on so much of what we've achieved as a country.

Swisher: So talk about the weaponizing of it. Because one of the things that's interesting ... Now you've recently, and we've talked about the uses of Facebook, the uses of — we can get into Donald Trump's Twitter thing in a second, because that can be a whole conference, essentially. But how do you see how it was weaponized, and it begs the questions, why weren't you weaponizing it? Like, why is the right wing so good at it?

Mossberg: And not just you, but the Democrats.

Well, look. Here's how I see it, and I hope others will jump into this debate in the months ahead because there's a lot we have to understand if we're going to avoid this continuing assault on our sources of information. Here's how I think about it. You know, I was very proud of my data and analytics team. They were largely veterans of the Obama campaigns, '08, '12, and then we brought in new people and brought in a lot of new expertise to build the next generation. And we had a lot of help from some people in Silicon Valley as well. And what we thought we were doing — here's the arena we were playing in — was going to like Obama 3.0, you know, better targeting, better messaging, and the ability to both turn out our voters as we identified them, and to communicate more broadly with voters.

Here's what the other side was doing, and they were in a different arena. Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will ...

Mossberg: How about "lies"?

Lies? You're really ... that's a good word too [laughter and applause]. The other side was using content that was just flat-out false, and delivering it in a very personalized way, both sort of above the radar screen and below. And you know, look, I'm not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination. That really influenced the information that people were relying on. And there have been some studies done since the election that if you look — let's pick Facebook. If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to, as we now know, the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages.

They were connected to the bots that are just out of control. We see now this new information about Trump's Twitter account being populated by millions of bots. And it was such a new experience. I understand why people on their Facebook pages would think, "Oh, Hillary Clinton did that, I did not know that. Well that's going to affect my opinion about her." And we did not engage in false content. We may have tried to put every piece of information in the best possible light, and explanations, but we weren't in the same category as the other side.

Mossberg: But, okay. So you weren't going to lie.

Right.

Mossberg: Good for you.

Well ... Yes ... [laughter]

Mossberg: I see you're rethinking that [laughs].

I'm not rethinking it, but everybody else better rethink it, because we have to figure out how to combat this.

Mossberg: Okay, but that's my point. My impression is that the left, the Democrats, liberals, whatever you want to call them, including Bernie Sanders'sfolks and everybody on the Democratic side, which at once time, 12, 15 years ago, was ahead of the Republicans on tech as it existed then, is way behind now.

Yeah, yeah.

Mossberg: And it's not just ... I mean, there's a way to weaponize tech that doesn't involve lying.

Right.

Mossberg: Or having Russians help you. But it is a political weapon, it's a fact of life now.

Swisher: So how do you do that?

Mossberg: How do you do it? How do we do it going forward?

Let me just do a comparison for you. I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I'm now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party.

Mossberg: What do you mean nothing?

I mean it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it ...

Mossberg: This is the DNC you're talking about.

The DNC, to keep it going. Okay. Donald Trump, who did nothing about really setting up any kind of data operation, inherits an RNC data foundation that, after the Republicans lost in 2012, and they thought they had a very good operation with the setup that Romney did called ORCA, they thought that was really state of the art, they lose.

So they raised — best estimates are close to a hundred million dollars, they brought in their main vendors, they basically said, "We will never be behind the Democrats again," and they invested between 2012 and 2016 this hundred million dollars to build this data foundation. They beta tested it. They ran it ... somebody was able to determine about 227,000 surveys to double check, triple check, quadruple check, the information.

So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation. Then you've got Cambridge Analytica and you know, you can believe the hype on how great they were or the hype on how they weren't, but the fact is, they added something. And I think again, we better understand that the Mercers did not invest all that money just for their own amusement. We know they played in Brexit, and we know that they came to Jared Kushner and basically said, "We will marry our operation," which was more as it's been described, psychographic, sentiment, a lot of harvesting of Facebook information, "We will marry that with the RNC on two conditions: You pick Steve Bannon, and you pick Kellyanne Conway. And then we're in." Trump says, "Fine, who cares," right? So Bannon, who'd been running the Breitbart operation, supplying a lot of the ... untrue, false stories ...

Mossberg: You gotta start saying lies.

Yeah. We know. So, they married content with delivery and data. And it was a potent combination. Now, the question is, where and how did the Russians get into this? And I think it's a very important question. So, I assume that a lot of people here may have — and if you haven't, I hope you will — read the declassified report by the Intelligence community that came out in early January.

Mossberg: This is 17 agencies ...

Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through these thousand agents, they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion. And I think it's fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign? And how did they know what messages to deliver?

Swisher: Who told them?

Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with? Because the Russians historically in the last couple of decades and then increasingly, you know, are launching cyber attacks, and they are stealing vasts amounts of information, and a lot of the information they've stolen they've used for internal purposes, to affect markets, to affect the intelligence services, etc. So this is different because they went public, and they were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running ... You know, there's all these stories of guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites and I've seen them now and you sit there and it looks like a sort of low-level CNN operation ...

Mossberg: Or a fake newspaper.

Or a fake newspaper ...

Mossberg: Like the Denver Guardian.

Like a fake newspaper, and so the Russians — in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I've talked to — could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided.

Mossberg: Guided by Americans.

Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.

Swisher: Who is that?

Now let me just finish, because this is the second and third step. So we know that they did that. We understand it. Best example: So within one hour, one hour of the Access Hollywood tapes being leaked, within one hour, the Russians — let's say WikiLeaks, something — dumped the John Podesta emails. Now, if you've ever read the John Podesta emails, they are anodyne to boredom [laughter]. But ...

Mossberg: Yeah, we had him here once.

Yeah, [laughter and applause], and forgive him for what he said about you. So, they were run-of-the-mill emails, especially run of the mill for a campaign.

"Should we do this?" "What should she say?" You know, just the stuff that is so common, basic. Within one hour they dumped them, and then they began to weaponize them. And they began to have some of their allies within the internet world, like Infowars, take out pieces and begin to say the most outrageous, outlandish, absurd lies you could imagine. And so they had to be ready for that, and they had to have a plan for that, and they had to be given the go-ahead. "Okay, this could be the end of the Trump campaign, dump it now. And then let's do everything we can to weaponize it."

And we know it hurt us. Because as I explain in my book, you know, the Comey letter, which was, now we know, partly based on a false memo from the Russians. It was a classic piece of Russian disinformation — comprimat, they call it. So, for whatever reason, and I speculate, but I can't look inside the guy's mind, you know, he dumps that on me on October 28th, and I immediately start falling. But what was really interesting, since the mainstream media covered that, as I say like Pearl Harbor, front pages everywhere, huge type, etc. And all of the Trump people go around screaming, "Lock her up, lock her up," and all of that. At the same time, the biggest Google searches were not for Comey, because that information was just lying out there, it was for WikiLeaks. And so voters who are being targeted with all of this false information are genuinely trying to make up their minds.

What does it mean? And we know that the Google searches for this stuff were particularly high in places in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Swisher: So, a couple of questions to this. That was fascinating actually. I was like riveted to that. Who was directing them, from your perspective? And do you blame — and I'm just going to use Facebook, because that's where a lot of this was done, especially around the fake news, either the Pope was voting for Trump, or there was one particular one I got in an argument with Facebook people about, you being a lizard, that was going around. And they kept arguing about the gray area and this and that, and I remember being in a call saying, "She's not a lizard!"

Thank you, Kara, thank you [laughter].

Mossberg: That's actually a kind thing from Kara.

I'm very touched!

Swisher: But ... [laughter] do you blame ...

I have that on a pillow, "She's not a lizard."

Swisher: I don't know if you're a lizard or not but ... [HRC laughs] I'm guessing you're not a lizard. But who do you think directed it? And do you blame Facebook, or any of these platforms, for doing nothing? What should they have done and are they culpable?

Let me separate out the questions. First, we're getting more information about all of the contacts between Trump campaign officials and Trump associates with Russians before, during and after the election. So I hope that we'll get enough information to be able to answer that question.

Swisher: But you're leaning Trump.

Yes ... yes. I'm leaning Trump. I think it's pretty hard not to. I think that the marriage of the domestic fake news operations, the domestic RNC Republican allied data, you know, combined with the very affective capabilities that the Russians brought. You know, basically the group running this was the GRU which is the military intelligence arm of the Russian military and they have a very sophisticated cyber operation, in bed with WikiLeaks, in bed with Goosefer, in bed with DC Leaks.

And you know, DC Leaks and Goosefer, which were dropping a lot of this stuff on me, they haven't done anything since early January. Their job was done. They got their job done. So we're going to, I hope, be able to connect up a lot of the dots, and it's really important because when Comey did testify before being fired this last couple of weeks, he was asked, "Are the Russians still involved?" And he goes, "Yes, they are. Look, why wouldn't they be? It worked for them!" And it is important that Americans, and particularly people in tech and business understand, Putin wants to bring us down. And he is an old KGB agent. I had, obviously, run-ins with him, because that in large measure prompted his animus toward me, and his desire to help Trump. But it is deeper than that, it is way beyond me.

So with respect to the platforms, you know, I am again not exactly sure what conclusions we should draw. But here's what I believe. I believe that what was happening to me was unprecedented and we were scrambling. We went and told everybody we could find in the middle of the summer, the Russians were messing with the election. And we were basically shooed away, like, "Oh you know, there she goes, vast right-wing conspiracy." Now it's a vast Russian conspiracy. Well, turned out we were right. And we saw evidence of it. We could track it. And we couldn't get ... we could not get the press to follow it and we never got confirmation. Remember, Comey was more than happy to talk about my emails, but he wouldn't talk about the investigation of the Russians. So people went to vote on November 8th having no idea that there was an active counter-intelligence investigation going on of the Trump campaign.

So if I put myself in the position of running a platform like Facebook, first of all, they've got to get back to trying to curate it more effectively. Put me out of the equation, they've got to help prevent fake news from creating a new reality. That does influence how people think of themselves, see the world, the decisions that they make. I don't know enough about what they could have done in real time. It's not like we were not having conversations with them, because a lot of the people on my team were. I also think I was the victim of a very broad assumption I was going to win. "It doesn't matter what you do to her ..."