But this "Russians want to sow discord" thing is a conspiracy theory. It's been investigated a billion times and the allegations always fall apart, yet people d

But this "Russians want to sow discord" thing is a conspiracy theory. It's been investigated a billion times and the allegations always fall apart, yet people don't reduce their belief in it - it's sort of like UFOs in that regard. We can even trace its evolution because it's not that old. Before the Trump election campaign, Russia wasn't being talked about much. The sudden spike in Russia/bot/fake news etc related conspiracies aligns exactly with Trump winning and the American left going into a sort of meltdown as they tried to explain why their candidate didn't flatten him. "Fake news" started as an attack on Trump which he then co-opted because the American right had been complaining about biased media for a lot longer than the left, so it was easy for him to do so as the base was already primed. We can even spot the moment at which the conspiracy changed from being "Russians want to get Trump elected" to "Russians want to sow generic discord". It was the moment Facebook revealed the list of adverts purchased by Russians during the election campaign, and it turned out that it was a total mix of ads for both sides! The ads weren't all for Trump at all, which was inexplicable given the claims up to that point. (actually a simple explanation is that the FB analysis was just selecting random false positives rather than shadowy Russian operators as they believed). So overnight true believers changed their beliefs to be "Russians want us to fight each other" which is ridiculous, because American politics has been famously divided and divisive for years. Like with George W Bush, who is apparently redeemed now, but I remember when he was supposedly just as bad as Trump is considered today. Why would anyone waste money on trying to create something Americans do just fine creating themselves?