The history of the term is a little funny. It had two distinct meanings during the course of the US 2016 election, shortly before it escaped to the rest of the world.
The first was the brief phenomenon of websites actually spoofing real news sites with confusing URLs and similar styles - think phishing for news. One example of this was "abcnews.com.co": see e.g. https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fake-... They would generally publish intentionally false stories with the goal of getting social media clicks and/or influencing public opinion, and usually in the direction of influencing public opinion in favor of US right-wing politics.
The second is the accusation of US right-wing politicians that mainstream journalism (the real ABC, etc.) is publishing intentionally false stories on their actual sites. This use of the term "fake news" pretty efficiently displaced the previous meaning, and left us with no real term to talk about that phenomenon. It generally implies that stories are being made up out of whole cloth with the intent of lying to the public.
At some point, thanks to repeated use of that phrase by the country that dominates the worldwide media, it escaped to the rest of the world - apparently to left-wing folks in Italy as well as to dictators across the globe. Assad has complained about living in a "fake news era". An official in Myanmar has called the very existence of the Rohingya people "fake news."
There has been a phenomenon, for probably as long as recorded human history has been around, where storytellers and journalists get things wrong because of human fallibility and not malicious intent. I think it's easy to understand why people would misread the announcement, and no accusation of malice is required.