Agreed the whole thing is disgusting, but I'm actually very interested in the last part you said about duping millions of people.
When I heard this story yesterday, I started wondering how many people's views were actually changed by these outlandish stories (the FBI agent found dead with apparent links to the clintons comes to mind). My guess would be that many of those who devoured this sort of story were only confirming their previously held biases about the corruption of the clintons--they just enjoyed having more reasons to hate them. I would also suspect that along the edges of this population, let's say people who are open to either party but have faced economic challenges over the last 10 years, there might be a cumulative effect of reading headlines like this every day on Facebook, even if you don't read the articles and assume they are fake. Something subconscious that holds more weight that a simple opinion post by a friend. Trump himself used a variation on this idea by simply parroting unfounded accusations, fake news headlines, and conspiracy theories to brand Hillary as a criminal. And maybe that effects all of us, to some degree. In an election where 1% swings in a few states could have changed the overall result, these effects may have been very important.
I do think that FB, Google and others have the responsibility to prevent fabricated news stories from spreading like cancers.