I really don't like that "fake news" became this term that means "news I disagree with". What it was describing at the time it was coming into popular usage, it mostly described "news" sites that in many cases used scripts to generate their content, and for the most part preyed upon far right sentiments. So yeah, we shouldn't censor "fake news" on the premise that it is something we disagree with, but rather whether it is easily verified as false(as many of these were).
"Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news. It's a dangerous phrase, trivially dismissing real news based on emotions and critically attacking propaganda based on facts.
Just call things as they are. News, lies, propaganda...
> "Fake news" came into popular usage because Trump was using it to disparage critical real news.
No, it came into popular usage to refer to propaganda supporting Trump which closely followed what RAND Corp. labelled the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda strategy used by Russia.
It was subsequently co-opted by Trump in the way you describe, but that's not how it came into popular usage.
No. You are seeking out earlier uses of the phrase to support your warped world view, which you accepted from those who co-opted the term. This is very recent history:
Google trends graph shows a fairly recent and step spike for the phrase "fake news"[1]. I'm sure the phrase was intermittently used for some time, but it's current usage send new, and much more popular.
My memory is the same as the comment you are replying to. "Fake news" was a left attack on the media supporting Donald Trump (think Breitbart). Trump and friends then coopted the term to describe the mainstream media and repeated it enough for the term to become associated more as Trump-thing than anything else.
"Fake news" was a left attack on the media supporting Donald Trump (think Breitbart).
No, "fake news" was used to label news that was quite literally fake. As in: false. Not true. It was not used to describe simply biased reporting.
As others have said, Trump co-opted the term and uses it to describe news that he doesn't like, regardless of truth. Thus, he has muddied the meaning of the term and created a new dog whistle. Brilliant move on his part.
Fake news was generated to appeal to all sides of the political spectrum, but the pro-right literally untrue news was much more popular than the pro-left literally untrue news.
"The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course."
I'm really saddened to see the sort of rhetoric used by the parent on HN.
"Fake News" is a nebulous term, but the real thing people are getting as is these sites that churn out this obviously fake content and/or generate it with scripts that gets shared literally tens of millions of times on facebook.
The reason people see Clinton as left-wing is because her campaign and the American media used this as a cynical marketing tactic to try and convince people to vote for her. Anyone who pointed out the fact that she did not, in fact, align with leftist politics was accused of practising "purity politics" and of hating her because she was a woman. The New York Times ran an opinion piece telling her critics to "grow up". There was a general feeling amongst the media that there could be no good-faith criticism or dislike for her from a left-wing perspective. A lot of this spread onto social media too, not helped by the astroturf campaigns by groups like ShareBlue/Correct The Record.
