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Of course there was disinformation ("fake news") before 2016 -- nobody would dispute that -- but it wasn't really framed as a crisis yet. So I would suggest you don't just dismiss this whole essay on the basis of semantic squabbling about the tl;dr summary.

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Who has to frame it as a crisis for it to count? I remember being very disturbed by the fake news getting upvoted on reddit when I was in high school. I remember talking about it with other people who were also disturbed.

When you were in high school Reddit accounted for maybe 5% of the users that Facebook and Twitter have right now

Most of them were not moms or grandmothers

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