There is a lot of scope creep in how this has evolved over the past five years. Early in 2016 when "fake news" first started being widely worried about, the Washington Post did an expose interview of two guys in Long Beach, CA who had created a series of fake newspapers, not staffed by any real reporters or writers, where they wrote all the articles themselves under fake names, and just completely made up both the headlines and the content based on what was generating the most clicks. It largely ended up as political content because it happened to be an election year and that sold, but it was strictly made up. They made no attempt at all to even care about real events. This was very unambiguously fake news, and it wasn't uncommon for sites like this to pop up out of nowhere because it was cheap money for unscrupulous types to just feed the outrage machine and profit.
But two things happened. First, something that explicitly fake is actually pretty easy to identify in an automated fashion and thus easy to root out once you know you're looking for it. Two, Trump himself took the word after it became apparent that much of the suckers being suckered into clicking on this crap were his strongest supporters, and completely poisoned the well by calling anything and everything he didn't like "fake news" as if an actual professional reporting operation at least attempting to do real investigations and interviewing real people was equivalent to two guys in an apartment making up headlines completely from their own imaginations.
Disinformation campaigns are somewhat orthogonal to that and a thornier issue. We're conflating many things. Some are just larger troll farms that are exactly equivalent to the two guys in an apartment, but operating with professional backing and financing in a more sophisticated manner. But they're just trying to make money. Some of what they say might actually be true. They don't care and aren't trying to push any particular agenda. But they're also not trying to produce true information and do so only incidentally if they do at all. At least some of it is actual foreign intelligence services conducting psyop campaigns, which definitely do care and are trying to push a particular agenda, but it's just to sow internal discord. They don't really care about one side or another of a contentious debate and will gladly inflame the worst actors of both sides. But these are being conflated with likely sincere people and organizations who are doing some level of real investigation and actually believe what they're writing, whether or not it's accurate. These are all umbrella'd under the "disinformation" term, but they're not the same thing.
Having Covid happen destroyed all hope of cleaning this up, too. We're now in the middle of an important global event affecting nearly everyone, but about which there are little in the way of facts, and we certainly can't know with certainty what an optimal course of action as a response was or should have been. We'll never be able to observe counterfactual worlds. Many important facts will only become known years in the future, and some will never become known at all.
But two things happened. First, something that explicitly fake is actually pretty easy to identify in an automated fashion and thus easy to root out once you know you're looking for it. Two, Trump himself took the word after it became apparent that much of the suckers being suckered into clicking on this crap were his strongest supporters, and completely poisoned the well by calling anything and everything he didn't like "fake news" as if an actual professional reporting operation at least attempting to do real investigations and interviewing real people was equivalent to two guys in an apartment making up headlines completely from their own imaginations.
Disinformation campaigns are somewhat orthogonal to that and a thornier issue. We're conflating many things. Some are just larger troll farms that are exactly equivalent to the two guys in an apartment, but operating with professional backing and financing in a more sophisticated manner. But they're just trying to make money. Some of what they say might actually be true. They don't care and aren't trying to push any particular agenda. But they're also not trying to produce true information and do so only incidentally if they do at all. At least some of it is actual foreign intelligence services conducting psyop campaigns, which definitely do care and are trying to push a particular agenda, but it's just to sow internal discord. They don't really care about one side or another of a contentious debate and will gladly inflame the worst actors of both sides. But these are being conflated with likely sincere people and organizations who are doing some level of real investigation and actually believe what they're writing, whether or not it's accurate. These are all umbrella'd under the "disinformation" term, but they're not the same thing.
Having Covid happen destroyed all hope of cleaning this up, too. We're now in the middle of an important global event affecting nearly everyone, but about which there are little in the way of facts, and we certainly can't know with certainty what an optimal course of action as a response was or should have been. We'll never be able to observe counterfactual worlds. Many important facts will only become known years in the future, and some will never become known at all.