Immediately following the election of Donald Trump south of the border, Craig Silverman and the team at Buzzfeed wrote the defining article on fake news, showing that completely fabricated stories like ‘Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS’ actually outperformed legitimate political coverage from the likes of the New York Times on Facebook

And now the term ‘fake news‘ has been popularized, bastardized, and wholly appropriated. What was previously defined as ‘a deliberate untruth published strictly for monetary or political gain,’ has now come to mean ‘I don’t like this story. It makes me look bad.’

In a followup piece, Silverman shows how the misinformation industry has shifted its focus to avoid Facebook’s crackdown on fake news pieces. Now it’s all about hyperpartisan media — websites that will blend legitimate reporting with clickbait viral headlines to create a morass where you can’t be sure what’s real and what isn’t.