How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN? Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is

How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN? Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?) Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.) I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring. --- Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such. Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either. At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is. The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-contend-we-have-no-idea/ http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)