'WikiLeaks helped Trump win US presidential elections'

Twitter posts during the final two months of the 2016 election race shows Clinton was much more heavily criticised on social media compared with her rival Donald Trump.

Posts relating to WikiLeaks were the most common form of attack on social media for the Democratic candidate, who was also heavily criticised on Twitter over an FBI investigation into her use of a private email server, researchers said.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK used computer analysis to study the top viral tweets each day between September 1 and November 8 last year.

They found that there were three times as many posts attacking Clinton than posts in her favour. By contrast, viral tweets relating to Trump were split equally in favour and against his campaign. Posts from Trump's social media campaign and his supporters had a more positive tone than that of his rival, with effective reach for slogans, policy promises and campaigning for swing states.

Tweets backing Clinton tended to compare her with her rival, and to attack Trump rather than praise Clinton. Trump was criticised for his performance in election debates more than his links to scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape. Trump supporters were more likely to share news reports from less credible sources, the study found. In all researchers analysed almost 3,500 posts, which together were retweeted more than 25 million times. Tweets were labelled as being favourable to Trump, Clinton, or neither. They used data from TweetElect.com, which collates the most retweeted posts related to the US election. Meanwhile, Donald Trump said on Wednesday he did not fault his son Donald Trump Jr for meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential election campaign and that he was unaware of the meeting until a few days ago.

Asked if he knew that his son was meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June last year, the president told Reuters in a White House interview: "No, that I didn't know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this." Eight months of investigations into allegations that Russian-sponsored hackers attempted to influence last year's US presidential election campaign have yielded no facts, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

Addressing a think-tank audience in Berlin, Lavrov said the US had turned up only unproven allegations. If Moscow really did have the power to throw elections, its neighbors would have much closer relations with Russia and there would be no Ukraine crisis, he added. Washington has been convulsed in recent days by allegations that President Donald Trump's son met a Russian-linked agent during the election campaign who was promising to provide compromising information about his opponent Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr eagerly agreed to meet the woman he was told was a Russian government lawyer who might have damaging information about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as part of Moscow's official support for his father's campaign, according to emails the son released on Tuesday. Trump said he did not fault his son for holding the meeting, writing it off as a decision made in the heat of an upstart, non-traditional campaign. "I think many people would have held that meeting," Trump said. "It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I'm hearing," Trump said. "Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that."

The emails were the most concrete evidence that Trump campaign officials might have been willing to accept Russian help to win the election, a subject that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency.

US President Donald Trump has said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would have preferred it if his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton would have won the US Presidential election. "Why would he want me? Because from day one I wanted a strong military, he doesn't want to see that. From day one I want fracking and everything else to get energy prices low and to create tremendous energy. We're going to be self-supporting, we just about are now. We're going to be exporting energy – he doesn't want that," he said in an interview with CBN.

He also said that if Clinton would have been elected as the President, US military "would be decimated". "So there are many things that I do that are the exact opposite of what he would want. So what I keep hearing about that he would have rather had Trump, I think 'probably not," he added.