Your priors are wrong - the evidence and the people presenting it have the burden of proof not the people saying this is more bullshit from a desperate group of people who have consistently lied for years.
I am not saying they have met a burden of proof, I'm saying that we don't censor news articles (even sensational or thinly sourced ones) because they haven't yet met a burden of proof.
And yes, the key to using the internet effectively is to filter things out that are garbage. I individually try not waste my time on bullshit, truth based organizations filter out a lot of crackpots: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2019020... and Twitter itself is free to try to do this filtering as well. I applaud them for trying to remove BS rather than trying to push addictive content but whatever. This very news site is interesting because they spend a lot of time trying to filter BS in favor of productive and informative conversations.
I don't doubt some things have been exaggerated, but I feel were pretty far past a theory right now. The question is just how much their influence affected policy.
SV is full of .. something. idk what to call these people, but reading this forum makes it clear they are all around me in my career domain.
The story received additional sources as it ran, and eventually grew into an investigation that yielded multiple criminal convictions.
The DNI publicly put out a report. I recall statements by the FBI Director, CIA Director, and NSA Director referring and promoting the conclusions drawn in the report (those 3 agencies were principally involved, in addition to being the three most important and largest intelligence agencies).
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
The Senate Intelligence Committee (which is GOP controlled) has also put out several reports concurring with Russian interference in the 2016 election.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
The initial news cycle would have been from highly valued and proven anonymous sources, which is typical for national security matters. If you are expecting a bunch of CIA analysts doxxing themselves on the front page of the NYT, you will be disappointed. That’s not how national security reporting (or reporting in general) works.
To be of excellent provenance doesn’t necessarily require a named source - if the paper and journalist have a good track record with unnamed sources in an area of expertise.