How to meddle an election?

The politics in the US is getting more and more exciting and juicy everyday that the government shutdown is still continuing while the Russian probe is still ongoing despite the government shutdown. More and more information about the Russian probe and the 2016 US presidential election is made public and reported across social media. It seems that the Russians tried to meddle the 2016 election. I would like to use my knowledge to try to guess how an election can be meddled.

Our society is built by networks that we are building or maintaining networks while making interaction with others. I think that it is okay to say that any two people are connected in some way and two strangers are two people who are connected significantly weak. The relationship between two people can affect these two people with different weights, one can have significantly greater influence over the other. There are several ways to calculate one's influence power (also called centrality). To meddle an election or manipulate an election result, the target is to convince more people agree on something and get their votes. When we have enough data (Facebook certainly has such power), we can study how to spread one opinion across the society. It is impossible to target all individuals, but once if we are able to find some people with significantly centrality, we can target these influential people, which is the most efficient way to influence the entire society. This is not a new idea that similar methods are used in marketing. However, what makes an election meddling is spreading false or made-up information. Election meddling uses made-up information to influence the targeted people or platforms then spread the false information across the society to affect the election results.

Overall, once someone can have an access to a massive database about social networks, spreading false information is not a very difficult or costly project at all.