The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
edit - disappointed this got flagged, it's only political because certain parts of the users turn it into flamewars. Russia intelligence was attributed as the hackers behind the DNC intrusion by top firms, and is accused of systematically coordinated the timing of damaging info with Wikipedia, the Trump campaign, and networks of social bots to successfully flip the election. Then Trump damaged NATO alliances and softened his part's platform on Ukraine/Crimea, among other things. Regrettable that we can't have a mature conversation about this critical and topical subject.
I feel like he was actually addressing the issues of the country and could have appealed to much of the electorate that ended up voting for Trump; at least the parts of it that weren't voting for Trump based on his more headline-grabbing (and other kinds of grabbing/threatening) attributes.
Hillary's collusion with the DNC is more troubling than the Russia narrative.
The DNC betrayed Democrats and worked to 'fix' the primary. That and the associated media are the real concerns.
The behavior of the DNC is also problematic (I doubt the republicans are better; one thing Trump is correct about is "The Swamp").
The general media problem is that after 9/11 every news channel became a money-making focused machine. Not something focused on reporting the news.
These problems and others covered elsewhere are /all/ issues that need real discussions and solutions.
I fear that, ultimately, the solution is education and thought; making everyone better people that strive to resist their base emotional reactions and verify that what their feelings tell them is actually the correct course of action, and not some sophisticated persuasion.
Small point (and one that isn't intended to negate the point you're making), but I believe that if this correlates (and I'm not sure that it does) it's not causal. The move from print to online and the increased focus on click-driven advertising vs subscriptions and 24-hour cable news cycle (which predates 9/11) better explains this than 9/11. The 24-hour news cycle is something I remember as far back as the Gulf War in 1990–91.
It was a Russian intelligence operation, not a narrative or meme. Crowdstrike's report was pretty open and shut on the intrusion side of things. Reports like this one coming out (as well as further ones, should the Mueller/FB supoenas be true) show the scope of the operation was much wider.