While some of the fake news comes from straight from California suburbs, it’s clear that a vast amount of these stories were created specifically to influence the election by a single source.

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Notice that these stories were not simply noise. They didn’t hold a neutral position. They were consistently aimed at two things: promoting Donald Trump and undermining people’s faith in democracy. Though, honestly, those might be seen as one thing.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

They drove fake news into right-wing sites on the same fuel that has powered conservative news sites from their inception: unreasoning fear. In the final three months before the election, these fake stories were spread more readily and more broadly than stories the traditional media. But then, the traditional media was also full of stories generated by Russia, who paid hackers to steal emails from private citizens and leak it back for articles that rarely stopped to ponder the source.

Even if they never touched a voting machine, there’s absolutely no doubt: Russia hacked the election.