[Bartweiss]

Even a year and a half later, I'm still sad about how quickly the meaning of "fake news" diluted. We throw it back and forth over CNN errors and inflammatory Daily Caller topic choices, but there's a very different meaning behind all of that - things that are literally just falsified, in the full "sky is green" sense of the word.

Something like "ABCnews.com.co" is A) impersonating ABC and B) publishing objectively-false stories. If Facebook wants to put a warning next to it, or drop its share priority, or only accept shares with comments attached, I don't give a damn. That's not an entry into a partisan fight, it's the news equivalent of flagging a spam link.

I have lots of Facebook friends who sometimes share dubious or ill-sourced stories, and I wish they wouldn't. But I have a few Facebook friends in a very different group, who post whole-cloth inventions at the level of the dumbest conspiracies, or take Onion and Duffleblog articles as real news. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon.