I'm a bit annoyed when people talk about "fake news" as if everyone understands what that means. It seems pretty clear to me that different people have different conceptions of what that is.
One of the best ways to make me cringe is to use "fake news" as a joke in the completely wrong context. It physically hurts me to realize this every time it happens (which is unfortunately common)
Not implying you are doing this, had to chime in tho cause it really does piss me off
I should clarify that doing this on purpose isn't even remotely funny. It's the realiziation that they have an extremely incorrect understanding of the term that hurts
I'm sure there was a moment when "fake news" meant stories coming from superficially reputable looking websites, that in reality were fugaciously created to give a veneer of respectability to made up stories. This meaning of "fake news", which I think is actually meaningful and useful, seems to have completely vanished, or maybe I just imagined it?
The term dates to the late 1980s when it referred to propagandistic video and audio "news releases" generally created by or for corporate interests. That usage continued through to mid-to-late 2000s decade.
It was applied to more general misinformation in the 2010s, before being 'undefined' by many of the promotors and beneficiaries of fake news.
It didn't vanish so much as it was vanished. Trump and friends calling anything they didn't like "fake news" effectively destroyed any utility or specificity the term may, briefly, have had. Brilliant move.
It’s also interesting that those who popularized the term “fake news” (left wing politicians) used it to discredit their opposition, by claiming some sort of “collusion” between Trump and the Russians.
And now that whole construct, which was reported on to great lengths by “real” news outlets, has been proven to be “fake news” as well.
As in, the phenomenon of fake news was actually faked? Could this even be messier?
Clinton didn't create the term fake news. The article you link to mentions her having used the term in a speech, but that doesn't mean she created it, nor, as I assume we're meant to infer, that she or the Democratic Party fabricated the phenomenon referred to as a post-hoc rationalization for having lost the election.
In fact, if you read the Wikipedia article on fake news[0], you'll note the term as well as the phenomenon predate Clinton's campaign and loss, even within that campaign cycle. People were talking about it well before that point.
Not implying you are doing this, had to chime in tho cause it really does piss me off
I should clarify that doing this on purpose isn't even remotely funny. It's the realiziation that they have an extremely incorrect understanding of the term that hurts