an upstanding young man. that is not something that hillary clinton ever said. both the quote was fake and the story was fake, but, boy, did that circulate in the lead-up to the 2016 election. as did so many other of these false stories that were designed to freak people out and/or drive people toward one of two candidates in the general election. during our 2016 election there were a lot of foreign entities. there were russian government propaganda entities but also hidden authorship entities like bots and patrols that literally created untrue news stories out of thin air, stories that were designed to exploit and exacerbate existing divisions in the united states to turn americans against each other, to turn people generally toward the trump worldview, especially enhance divisions among democrats or make democrats feel like it wasn't worth it to vote. these made-up stories were also just sort of brutalizing made-up outraged stories about terrible barbarism to make you feel like we were at the end of the line in terms of human beings being able to live alongside one another. when we came to understand what russia did in the 2016 election, those made-up false stories