User:Etanyag/sandbox

DEFINITION REVISION:

Fake news is a new term, or neologism, used to refer to fabricated news that originated in traditional news media and has now spread to online media

Global prominence as a result of 2016 US elections
Fake news became a global subject and was widely introduced to billions as a subject mainly due to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Numerous political commentators and journalists wrote and stated in media that 2016 was the year of fake news and as a result nothing will ever be the same in politics and cyber security. Governmental bodies in the U.S. and Europe started looking at contingencies and regulations to combat fake news specially when as part of a coordinated intelligence campaign by hostile foreign governments. Online tech giants Facebook and Google started putting in place means to combat fake news in 2016 as a result of the phenomena becoming globally known.

Professor Philip N. Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford studied web traffic in the United States prior to the election. He found that about one half of all news on Twitter directed at Michigan was junk or fake, and the other half came from actual professional news sources.

GLOBAL PROMINENCE REVISION:

Google Trends shows that the term Fake News only recently gained traction in online searches in October of 2016