Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admitted to MSNBC’s Brian Williams Thursday night that the Republican presidential candidate’s recent campaign-trail proclamation — that Hillary Clinton faces a “likely indictment” by the FBI — is based on inaccurate reporting. Still, she said, factual or not, “the damage is done to Hillary Clinton."

But when we went three months before the election, that critical time, we actually saw the fake news spike. And we saw the mainstream news engagement on Facebook for those top 20 stories decline.

And so at the end of the day, in that critical moment, the fake news of those top 20 stories was getting more engagement on Facebook than some of the stories from the biggest media outlets in the U.S. And that was incredibly surprising. I didn't actually expect fake news to win out in that sense.

And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false.

But the answer that they always gave me was that, you know, it was simply for money. There are a lot of sites run out of Veles, run out of Macedonia in general that we found. In particular, there's a huge cluster of websites in English about health issues because they find that that content does really well.

And if they sign up, for example, for Google AdSense, an ad program, they can get money as people visit their sites and it's pretty straightforward. So they tried election sites, and over time they all came to realize that the stuff that did the best was pro-Trump stuff. They got the most traffic and most traction.

So one, when people create the false stuff and if they're smart about it - if I put it that way - you know, they know that it needs to appeal to emotion. They know that maybe if it can have a sense of urgency, if it can be tied to things people care about, that's probably going to do well in terms of fake stuff. Whereas when you come in as the debunker, what you're doing is actively going against information that people are probably already, you know, willing to believe and that gets them emotionally. And to tell somebody I'm sorry that thing you saw and shared is not true is you coming in in a very negative way unfortunately. And so the reaction is often for people to get defensive and to disagree with you. And just in general you just seem like kind of a spoil sport. You're ruining the fun or you're getting in the way of their beliefs. And a lot of times when I put debunkings out there, you know, some of the reactions I get are people saying, well, it might as well be true. You know, he could have said that or that could have happened. Or, of course, you get accusations that, you know, you're biased. And so the debunkings just don't appeal as much to us on a psychological level.