The Daily Beast among others has been on this and the more that gets sunlight on the election’s fuzzy logic, the better.

Aside from what Steve Bannon calls the unfortunate necessity of Cruzbots, the 2016 election was a perfect storm of mutually assured interests and active measures: Russians, the GOP, RWNJs, Big-Data media players, and other assorted reactionaries.

And then there’s the entire voting apparatus coming under attack in a variety of ways ranging from suppression from within and hacking attacks from outside the national boundaries.

The perfect storm of the 2016 election added some unfortunate circumstances, including partisanship in intelligence agencies, free MSM, and some less than effective analysis of polling data and associated rapid response.

And then there’s the orphan of defeat hovering over the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower about Russian adoptions attended by many fathers.

A recent Vanity Fair piece highlighted speculation among Washington Democrats that the Trump campaign’s data operation could point to collusion between Trump and Russia. [...] As The Daily Beast and others have reported, Russian propaganda on Facebook and other social-media platforms passed itself off as authentic American voices; targeting refugees, posing as an American Muslim group and backing an Atlanta-based duo supporting Black Lives Matter. Depending on which cohort was being targeted, the efforts encouraged pro-Trump voters to intensify political participation, black voters to abandon Hillary Clinton for Trump, and Muslim voters to consider Clinton an Islamophobe. [...] “Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities,” the Observer reported. [...] Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top White House advisor, played a role in Cambridge Analytica’s work. A cover story in Forbes published shortly after the election noted that “Kushner’s crew” brought on the firm “to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most...”

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”. Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign. www.theguardian.com/...

The Trump campaign spent about $85 million on Facebook advertising and promotion, and according to Hong, Facebook and Google both sent liaisons to the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica to help them better use the tech companies’ ad targeting tools. www.slate.com/...

“If a link between Cambridge Analytica’s work with the Trump campaign and collusion with Russia does surface, those social media companies could be implicated as well.”

x Things you should know...

1) Global Science Research/Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) harvested data on 30 mil. unwitting FB users pic.twitter.com/Tx8ShrHEjp Ã¢ÂÂ Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) April 2, 2017

x Also: The guy who helped steal your data from Facebook on behalf of Cambridge Analytica... now works for Facebook.https://t.co/Kh6kSOMezx Ã¢ÂÂ Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) October 11, 2017

x May 18, 2017: Investigators Reviewing Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart News. Read the full timeline here: https://t.co/GebFcL9RlM Ã¢ÂÂ Robert Golden (@robertgolden14) October 2, 2017

x Hillary Clinton says Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica had role in Kenya's annulled election #CambridgeAnalytica #CNP https://t.co/bHDM2s5Soa Ã¢ÂÂ Alexander Hamilton (@AHamiltonSpirit) October 11, 2017

and some desperate moron is trying to divert MSM interest...