Manka Dhingra won the campaign, flipping control of Washington’s senate to Democrats. (Photo via the Dhingra campaign)

At this point, it’s clear that foreign actors tried to impact the 2016 presidential election through social media, often using false information about candidates. But this week we saw signs of similar meddling in a local election — specifically, a Senate race in Washington state.

The race was in Washington’s 45th congressional district, an area in the suburbs east of Seattle. The election got a lot of attention because the race decided who controlled Washington’s state legislature: Democrats or Republicans.

GeekWire learned this week that fake accounts and bots were trying to influence the election by spreading inflammatory information, much of it false, through Twitter and Facebook. The revelation could point to more meddling in that race and others like it. We discuss all the implications on this episode of the Week In Geek.

We also take a trip 500 feet above Seattle, on the scaffold that’s helping construction workers revamp the city’s iconic Space Needle.

And we learn about Mosaic, a new TV show/film/app hybrid from director Steven Soderbergh, who is famous for movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the Ocean’s Eleven series.

The new project is a murder mystery, but with a twist: The viewer gets to choose what order they watch the series in and also has access to supplementary material like newspaper clippings. GeekWire editor Todd Bishop interviewed Soderbergh about Mosaic and watched the whole thing — Todd says he highly recommends it.

Plus, Twitter has finally expanded to 280 characters, and not everyone on the GeekWire team is happy about it.

On the Random Chanel this week: Stranger Things fans crash a museum website; A bad joke from a Seattle politician; and Miley Cyrus is pumped about Seattle’s new mayor. Yaaaasss!

Listen to the episode above or download the MP3 here. Get every episode using this RSS feed, or subscribe in Apple PodcastsStitcher, Google Play or wherever you get podcasts.

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