How and why?
For all intents and purposes, the term "fake news" behaved like all buzzwords. Which means, someone with clout - this time the president of the United States himself - used it, and everybody pounced on it. Buzzwords come in many forms and with varying degrees of misdirection, dishonesty or vapidity. Some are political, like the infamous "death tax" for inheritance tax, others are consumerist, like "metrosexual", yet others are vaguely technical, such as "cyber", some starkly euphemistic, for example "kinetic" as a replacement for "killing people with guns or missiles".
Most buzzwords involve some explaining while they spread through public discourse. Providing an explanation of the meaning may be necessary or not, but it is done even if there is not much need to do it. Another one hundred words of effortless copy in a column or comment section is hard to resist, as is showing the author understands his or her subject matter. Many buzzwords go away at some point, some are resurrected briefly a decade or more after falling out of use, such as the term "super predator" from the tough on crime 1980s/90s. which made an appearance in the US presidential elections in 2016.
Fake news is more interesting than most because it exploded into public discourse and caused intense fights over its meaning.
The combination of speed and not fully defined and accepted meaning makes "fake news" special.
To some, "fake news" describes completely made up publications like TheOnion, America's Finest News Source, or Der Postillion in Germany. The initial focus in the U.S. and much of Europe were sites that featured completely made up news that were - unlike the Onion - not easily recognized as fake and were blamed as influencing, or trying to influence, the US election.
Almost immediately, the definition "a site of completely made up articles" saw so-called "propaganda sites" included (one frequently mentioned site was Russian Sputnik News). Given that Sputnik and others have been accused of being nothing but purveyors of false news and narratives, it is easy to see that labeling them "fake news" requires no effort.
"Fake news" describes largely political reporting, thus having much higher stakes than, say "metrosexual".
Even better, calling something "fake news" allows us to dismiss a whole publication, eliminating any need to evaluate articles. While the terms "propaganda" or "lies" are often used in the same manner, calling something propaganda or a lie still implies some degree of evaluation and debunking, "fake news" does away with this - however superficial - requirement.
From here, it is yet another small step to call individual articles in mainstream media "fake news" if they contain factual errors or conclusions you cannot substantiate or simply disagree with.
And so it happend, as this and other Twitter users state:
Niall Stanage Verified account
Really striking how fast "fake news" -- a phrase that initially had specific meaning -- has come to mean "anything with which I disagree."
The blogster has seen numerous examples of this in the wild, for example one blogger calling all the reporting on the Snowden documents "fake news".
"Fake news" is also being used as a slightly less offensive replacement for "conspiracy theorists".
A great example of this is an article on Breibart News in the German mainstream conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ). With respect to the "Free Syrian Army" [FSA], FAZ says: Outside of extreme right wing or "fake news" sites, they [FSA] are seen as relatively moderate Syrian rebels....
With 'fake news' now a catch all for anything you might dislike, it became even more toxic when hate speech was introduced into the already badly defined term.
We have talked about this in the earlier post German government opens pathway to internet censorship: lumping together Fake News and hate speech.
For a more philosophically polished discussion of the role of technology, The Guardian has an article Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy – the digital giants.
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