About this video by TEDEd: "With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart."
The term "fake news" is recent, but promulgating misleading and false information is age-old. Before the use of social media influencing public opinion by manipulating information was called "disinformation" or disinformation campaigns." A BBC article under the heading "Nothing New Here," The (almost) complete history of fake news, states:
Misinformation, spin, lies and deceit have of course been around forever. But what Silverman and others uncovered was a unique marriage between social media algorithms, advertising systems, people prepared to make stuff up to earn some easy cash and an election that gripped a nation and much of the world.