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.
Although I do understand your frustration with news media and the echo chambers echoing precisely the wrong thing without making any attempt in correction.
It was adopted by right-wing (specifically, pro-Trump) people in the US specifically to drown out its earlier use to describe pro-Trump propaganda that followed what RAND Corp had described as the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda approach used by Russia in other contexts (and which, it is increasingly evident, did so because it was in fact, often engineered by the same people who engineered the Russian propaganda that that label described.)
It's a term used by both the left and the right. By politicians and the media.
> In the doubt I changed the wording. I did not expect the term to be political.
You shouldn't have. Who cares if it is political. You are the author and you should express yourself the way you want.
You could try being literate.
(Closed captions: "you should express yourself any way you want - if you don't care about anybody understanding your message." That is actually the opposite of communication: mumbling to yourself in a one-person language about nobody taking the effort to understand you.)
No, both sides love using the term about anything the other side says.
In a lot of ways, I really don't blame the current political climate, because the US has seen way worse (read up on the US 1800 Presidential Election). I actually blame poor applications of algorithms to what folks view. The bias caused not only by the beliefs of the person training the box and the professional poster's ability to learn how to manipulate the results (the next generation of SEO) has increasingly made twitter and facebook painful to use. Add a large bit of tribalism that is baked right into humanity and you have a lot of fun. Further strain through the idea that a lot of companies won't even just let the users pick accounts they always want to see regardless of the beliefs of the provider, and you get a added bit of helpless feeling in the populace.
Which makes writing a pain. I've seen some folks take offense at grant applications that are basically some of the most dry reading you will find. It once was a don't use this era's forbidden words (e.g. the word "empower" had a very strange evolution in grants). Now its memes.
Regardless, the term 'fake news' is IMHO itself kinda fake news.