The closest we had to this in the past were tabloids but people could more easily categorise those than the thousands of "Truth News Online"-esque articles peddled on social media. It's an extreme torrent of an old issue, we scaled it up.
Very few campaigns ran on extreme blatant lies and warped reality as we have seen the past few years...
So yes, money might be a shady motive behind this hunt but there is also quite a lot of damage that we haven't yet found a way to deal with. And it's causing very real problems, in real life, right now.
Not that these problems were caused directly by social media but they are adding fuel to the fire and it only seems to be increasing now when having checks on them becomes another divisive subject and added as another single-issue partisan bullshit.