Dark Clouds Gather Over Home of Fakebook

Last October, with just a few weeks to go until the US presidential election, I pointed out something rather strange about Donald Trump’s election campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump had read out a leaked email he claimed was from Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal. It suggested that, in Blumenthal’s view, the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died, could have been prevented by Clinton, who was then secretary of state. The crowd lapped it up.

In fact, as I pointed out, the words Trump read had been lifted from a Newsweek article and falsely attributed to Blumenthal by Sputnik, a Russian news website.

It was already clear that the Russian government was meddling in the election. The Department of Homeland Security had issued a statement that the Kremlin had “directed” the hacking of email accounts associated with the Democratic Party and that its intention was “to interfere with the US election process”.