In 2016, Americans would hear a term to describe the news of the day, “fake news”. Once this term hit the lexicon it would become a ping pong term used to describe anything a reader or elected official didn’t like. But the term has a specific meaning. Fake News is news that is clearly made up and published online to lead a reader to believe in something that is not true. It is not simply bad reporting, biased leaning information, but is outright manufactured to confuse the information stream.

First, there is a primary source of information injection that is then fed to both knowing or unwitting echo sites resulting in an affected audience mixed with truth and lies.

Second, based on reader trending, the injected fake news reaches to aggregation sites and social media sites like Facebook or Twitter lending to more to pass the information on to others without knowing if the information is true or not. This is known as Argumentum ad populum, the appeal to the people fallacy. The Trump Administration used this method all through the 2016 campaign citing how popular a view was instead of how correct a view was. Then that would become the truth for the day.

The KGB used methods during the cold war to drop documents and have them found by journalists under a premise different than intended by the operator. Then the journalists would take those documents and print them. One example occurred when West German officials were framed as Nazi sympathizers after a document dump in a lake in Czechoslovakia. Under the premise that they were simply lost documents in a lake, journalists were set up by the Czech arm of the KGB to affect a campaign.

Pizzagate
Consequences:
In 2016, stories ranged from Hillary Clinton health scares, spin on death of DNC staffer, and the most dangerous example, Pizzagate. Based on no evidence but the endless cycle of fake news and conspiracy sites, Edgar Welch fired 3 shots in Comet Ping Pong, a popular DC pizzeria on December 4, 2016.

Clint Watts, J.M. Berger, Andrew Weisburd report:

Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy

James Comey and the FBI used Russian Fake News to render decision on Hillary Clinton server case. The fake document claimed to show AG Lynch was compromised and had arranged with Debbie Wasserman Schultz to end the FBI investigation.

Useful Articles:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/28/the-man-who-duped-trumpkins-fox-news

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.llrMe0Kl1#.obV5lmZo1