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Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

The term only became popular after Trump's win [1], not while it was happening, which is forever (I once read in a real paper newspaper about an amputee who had donkey's legs attached in place of his own). This suggests people don't like it because they went looking for something to blame for his winning. It's entirely a partisan political concern, not a fundamental one.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

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I was in another country, and still seeing the political bias (CNN+) in the reporting. Call me old school, but 'news' and 'journalism' is meant to be impartial. It wasn't. Opinion piece after propaganda opinion piece.

I think maybe, we have just woken up to what is going on.

It became popular after he won because he started using the term incorrectly and labeling everything he disagrees with as fake news.

People weren't looking for something to blame his winning on. That's a loaded statement. They were looking for reasons that he won. That's a reasonable thing to do. We've never had a President like him. Our polling methods in the 2016 election didn't predict him winning. Obviously people missed something that was a factor in this election and fake news is one of the things they looked into.

Had Trump not butchered the term I doubt we would still be talking about it much in the public forum.

I'm not sure why either of these comments is being downvoted. They're both true at the same time, though I agree with you that the parent comment overstates what Trump actually did which was weaponize the critique into something to generally dismiss expert opinion.

I think you're seeing liberals and conservatives being even-handedly "triggered". Or maybe people are telling themselve that they are sick of politics being discussed, yet they keep coming back to it and lapping it up.

You're reversing cause and effect. Trump latched onto the term after the entire press started blaming his victory on "fake news" - that's where he got the idea from. (A lot of his ideas seem to just be whatever's been in the press last, actually.)

I am aware that Trump got the idea from the press, my point was that had Trump not stolen the term as a coverall for news stories he disagrees with then term would have been largely forgotten.

The Google trends map in the comment I replied to shows the original peak in Novermber of 2016 which I think started when Buzzfeed ran an article about fake news stories having more engagement on Facebook than true news stories leading up to the election. [1]

There's another peak in early December that is probably from Hillary mentioning it in a speech. [2]

There's a third peak in January which is probably from when Trump wouldn't let Jim Acosta ask a question and called him and CNN fake news. [3]

After that, it was officially added into Trumpian vernacular. Had he not started using the term incorrectly on a regular basis, we would not have seen the continued popularity of the word that the graph shows after December 2016. There would have been some peaks due to various academic studies about actual fake news coming out and being reported on but most of the popularity and staying power comes from Trump.

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/03/ho...

[3] http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/01/11/donald-trump-press-con...

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