You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news. It was - complete and utter fabrication on an industrial scale, and it had devastating effects.
Your problem is that you're interpreting it in terms of "is wrong/is right" instead of "deliberately lying/trying to be accurate". Perhaps news publications should've been more skeptical, but they themselves weren't trying to make things up.
The politicians involved knew that their claims were not backed up by facts.
They arguably should have been more skeptical but it's very different from the situation where some place like Breitbart runs a propaganda piece which is easily debunked using public information, like the fake electoral map they printed which flipped entire states to maintain the “coastal elites” narrative they're selling.
The mainstream media has some serious blemishes from that era (Valerie Plame comes to mind) but they have editors, publish corrections, etc. and it's a monstrous exaggeration to try to equate the two.
The paid protesters story is a great example: the campaign benefited from and recirculated rumors about that which started on random blogs, conspiracy sites like InfoWars, and outright fakes like abcnews.com.co throughout the election. The guy who tweeted that photo might have been a Republican acting in what he believed was good faith but he was primed to think of that as likely by the prior months of unfounded accusations and as soon as he shared that photo, it was widely circulated by supporters including Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager before becoming CNN's commenter representing the campaign.
Officials supplied the false information which served as the raw material the media's fake news was produced with.
This is a famous quote from Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, from an article that includes many hawkish quotes from anonymous sources.
"Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-ir...
Here's a quote from an opinion piece by William Safire:
"Two terrorist-sponsoring nations are racing to acquire nuclear weapons. One is Iraq, whose scientists already have the know-how..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/10/opinion/arafat-s-implausib...
Is this fake news? I'd say so. But, I have an even lesser criterion for fake news -- I think the most insidious type of fake news doesn't necessarily tell a single lie, but rather selectively reports the truth.
I am also 100% certain that it's impossible to filter out "fake news", whatever your definition is, without suppressing some true but fringe information.
Plus, is it really a good idea to suppress a meta-discussion about propaganda and false information? Those "fake news" articles and their corresponding beliefs will still exist, even if Facebook manages to filter them out, but proponents of those ideas will either never see critical discussion or they'll just move to other platforms. It seems like a great way to further fracture our already divided society.
You're getting hung up on the term 'fake news'. In this context this term has a specific meaning, different than what you're referring to. 'Fake News' are sites with content that is purposely false (though it could plausibly be true) that is also usually outrage-inducing. At the same time they attempt to pass themselves off as credible news organizations. Their business model involves getting their fake content to go viral, increasing views and their advertising revenue.
There's several levels to "truth".
What happened.
What an eyewitness/machine reported happened
Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event
Was all of this reported faithfully
Separately was reporting done to verify the facts.
And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans.
So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ?
ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with.
This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue)
My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem.
In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things."
The larger system at play her must be front and center.
Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs.
And of course the tool to Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem