The 2016 presidential election in the United States stood to be historic—and historic it was, albeit in part for the wrong reasons. Donald Trump’s rise to power was unique, and in time the public would witness the dropping of one bombshell after the next concerning the circumstances around the election; a steady flow of revelations around Russian election interference in the lead-up to November 2016 ate away at Trump’s initial apparent triumph over opposing candidate Hillary Clinton. Much of the voting public experienced both the election interference, and the backlash, over social media and internet platforms. The truth about election interference seemingly had to be pried from the industry: only with the threat of serious congressional inquiry culminating in a 2017 hearing did it emerge that Russian state-controlled disinformation operators had infiltrated leading American social media networks operated by Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, and Twitter.
Source: Disinformation and the Business of the Consumer Internet | MediaWell