Talk:Fake news

Origin of the term “fake news“

this article begs for an explanation of the term. Google’s Ngram indicates it began to appear in 2001 but wasn’t used much. It really took off in 2013. Can anyone suggest where it came from and why it suddenly became a buzzword? In particular, it appears to precede the Trump presidency. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 04:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

It was popularised in the Cardiacs' song Dive with the lyrics:

Anna Ford hammers a post into a cup of mud claiming it is the ground

Really then anything is better than that

Is better than watching your fake news win in the end

2A00:23EE:1530:160D:30E8:1D87:C2BE:526A (talk) 18:57, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree. The article is absent about the term "fake news" and how it became popular in history but gives an entire section for Trump.

What do RS say? Slatersteven (talk) 10:50, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Appears to be a rather lengthy explanation of the term in the article. O3000, Ret. (talk) 15:09, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Fake News as a term jumped into the media after the election in 2016. I read an erroneous comment in the Talk pages which claimed that the term had trended up from 2013 – That is what you get if you do not change the Smoothing parameter from its default of 3 (change it to 1). The occurrence in books and journals, as charted by Google ngrams, shows a huge leap for 2017.

Before looking at ngrams, look at the Google search after restricting to 2016 alone: I see the top thirty hits all are in November and December. Buzzfeed and other started a hot topic, just after the election. Donald Trump and allies were culprits. (After searching on fake news, click Tools and set the range for time.) Here is the url for my Google search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+news&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=d4e6502fa6e2c4f1&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A2016%2Ccd_max%3A2016&tbm=#ip=1

Now for ngrams: Lines below summarize the results for 1800-2019. My usage numbers are from my specified graph, which reports million-times-percent. (Google ngrams do not include the newspapers reported by the Google search above, which found news in November and December.)

1893 was the start of continuous non-zero years. Mostly 0.2 or so for 100 years,

World War years had some above 0.5.

2004 was the first year over 1.0 (inching up).

2009 had a local peak of 3.8; 2016 reached 3.6.

2017 to 2019: 47, 150, 160

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28fake+news+*+1000000%29&year_start=2000&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=0

I used the en-US-2019 corpus since Fake News is a Trump thing. He is both conduit for false information and case-0 for crying Fake News as condemnation. RichardFloyd (talk) 03:23, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Use of AI as fake news as a potential subtopic?

I've noticed that the article lacks most mention of any sort of use of AI used to create fake news. The article itself occasionally mentions using AI to counter it, but not to using AI to create fake news, other than briefly when talking about fake news in Mexico. Should a subtopic be made dedicated to AI creating fake news, or should it be placed in a different section? DroopyB (talk) 14:16, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Do you have any sources discussing this as a wide issue? Slatersteven (talk) 14:17, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

What's considered a "wide issue"? I have sources on AI misinformation and AI being used as fake news, but none of them directly call the issue a "wide" issue. DroopyB (talk) 14:35, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

What I mean is, does this violate [p[wplundue]], what major RS has taken notice of this as an issue? Slatersteven (talk) 14:40, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

What does it mean to "violate [p[wplundue]]"? Stevesuny (talk) 18:12, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Typo, its meant to be a link to wp:undue or "demonstrate this is anything more than a narrow or finge view that is highly relevant to the topic". Slatersteven (talk) 18:15, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

There is this recent academic article which discusses this topic critically and cites a lot of material on the subject: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/misinformation-reloaded-fears-about-the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-misinformation-are-overblown/ AcademiaObscura (talk) 13:46, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Interesting... ''Flux55'' (talk) 16:57, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

I made an account just to say this page needs work

Hello Wikipedia, normally your pages are easy to read. This one is very long and has no table of contents or way to easily navigate it. Sorry I can't help. HeretoCriticize (talk) 21:54, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The History section is missing the Cold War entirely...

...and should be expanded. JackTheSecond (talk) 23:15, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Any ideas what should be added?--Jack Upland (talk) 23:26, 24 March 2024 (UTC)