A scourge is killing people’s minds, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the world needs a massive campaign to stop it. Across the nation, people lament its rise, and the threat it poses to America. Opioids? ISIS? Nope. “Fake news.” Even homicidal dictators agree things have gotten out of control. “We’re living in a fake news era, as you know,” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said, dismissing an Amnesty International report that his government hanged as many as 13,000 prisoners.
Factual falsehoods and straight-up lies started when the first first caveman claimed that, yes, that handprint on the wall is mine, and it is huge. Fast-forward a few millennia, and you’ll find hoaxes circulating online since Usenet was how people mainly communicated online. But “fake news” as an epithet, if not an accurate description of a story about, say, a child sex ring at a pizza joint, is something new—a seemingly straightforward concept that has shattered into a kaleidoscope of easily manipulated meanings.
But how did the discourse around this so quickly spiral from “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump” (he didn’t) to Donald Trump shouting “fake news” at a CNN reporter during a press conference before his inauguration and incessantly tweeting about it after his inauguration? The origin story of “fake news” reflects the dizzying speed at which semantic shifts occur in the social media era. But it reveals far more: What happens to factuality itself as algorithms replace humans, Facebook supplants traditional media, and the president declares war on the press. That perfect storm has made “fake news” as unstuck from fact—and as unstoppable—as any viral hoax. Watching the meaning of “fake news” evolve shows just how easily even facts about facts can slip away.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-made-nothing/
