Hillary Clinton has blamed just about everyone and everything for her embarrassing loss last November: The Russians, the FBI director, the DNC, former President Barack Obama.
Wait, there’s more. She blames “Anti-American forces,” low-information voters, high-information voters, stupid Republicans, stupid Democrats, Bernie Sanders, incompetent pollsters, misogynists, suburban women, rural women, The New York Times, Fox News, fake news.
We all thought she had run out of excuses, but the Clintons are a bottomless pit of excuses. So now, Hillary blames social media for losing the White House to a TV reality show star.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter cost Hillary the election. Oh, and “content farms.”
“The other side was using content that was just flat-out false, and delivering it in a very personalized way, both sort of above the radar screen and below,” Hillary said on Wednesday at a tech conference in Silicon Valley to an audience that applauded her every claim.
“And you know, look, I’m not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination,” said the woman who oversaw a secret server in her home and the destruction of 30,000 emails, along with the hard drives that contained them. “That really influenced the information that people were relying on. And there have been some studies done since the election that if you look — let’s pick Facebook. If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to, as we now know, the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages.”
She continued: “They were connected to the bots that are just out of control. We see now this new information about Trump’s Twitter account being populated by millions of bots. And it was such a new experience. I understand why people on their Facebook pages would think, ‘Oh, Hillary Clinton did that, I did not know that. Well that’s going to affect my opinion about her.’ And we did not engage in false content. We may have tried to put every piece of information in the best possible light, and explanations, but we weren’t in the same category as the other side.”
Hillary said 17 intelligence agencies “concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through these thousand agents, they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion. And I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign? And how did they know what messages to deliver?”
Then she got more specific, wading in to how she lost the key states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. She says the Russians — “let’s say Wikileaks, something” — dumped false information about her. Deluged with that on social media, voters — dumb ones, especially, Hillary said — on the fence in the waning days were searching for the truth, she said. “And we know that the Google searches for this stuff were particularly high in places in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Hillary concluded.
Then Hillary dabbled in her own fake news. She pondered Trump’s rise of “fake” followers on Twitter, saying “Who is behind driving up Trump’s Twitter followers by the millions? We know they’re bots. Why? I assume there’s a reason for everything. Is it to make him look more popular than he is? Is it to try to influence others on Twitter about what the messaging is?”
She added that the bot creators could be “sitting in Moscow, or Macedonia, or the White House.”
This claim, ignited by a tweet this week that said Trump had suddenly gained 3 million new followers in just days, was picked up by The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Newsweek — even Teen Vogue. But that allegation was quickly shot down by Twitter, Business Insider reported.
In the end, Hillary blamed “low-information voters” who were persuaded by the deluge of fake news on Facebook, saying, “Some people were sucked in. Some people stayed home. Some people voted Trump.”
So, the two-time loser is saying that if only stupid people had voted for her, she’d have her feet up on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
But that’s the thing: Americans aren’t that stupid.