How the alt-right media machine stole the "Fake News" tag

This really is a mark of just how efficient and savvy the media machine around Trump is:

But though the term [Fake News] hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

And Trump himself has grabbed onto it gleefully:

I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017

The main thrust of the article is correct, and I can’t help worrying that the current efforts to counter “fake news” by appealing to government and the social networks will prove counter-productive.

Gosh, I can't see any way that handing over that power to government and corporate interests will backfire on us. None at all.

— Adam Tinworth (@adders) February 7, 2017

If that simpler solution is too dangerous – perhaps we just have to buckle down and do the hard work of building audiences, getting better at using social media and debunking lies compellingly.