Nothing new, sadly. Before the 2016 and 2020 election, fake news farms in Macedonia made the rounds [1] - these were in it for the money, and in 2015 there were reports about Russian propaganda farms targeting Serbia and the rest of Europe [2].
Yes, back before You-Know-Who neutralized the phrase "fake news" by turning it into a generic insult to disparage legitimate news organizations, the big story was all these actual fake newspapers popping up, made to look legitimate, but actually pumping out nonsense and political propaganda instead. Suddenly the phenomenon just stopped getting reported on, and we now mostly forget that these fake sites even exist.
Yea, I've made it my general practice on HN to not even say the guy's name because whenever you do, your comment boards the upvote-downvote roller coaster, and I'm not going for controversy.
Oh please. Your Voldemort never had the power to neutralize that term. People who were clued-in enough to know about Fake News before Trump wasn’t swayed in their belief. And people who were blissfully aware of it (of reality) would just think that it was a new “Trump Thing” and then delude themselves into thinking that getting rid Trump would be the same as getting rid of Fake News (quotation marks may or may not apply).