alt Hacker NewsI think people that are trying to argue the "fake news have always existed" is missing the point at best (or wishful ignorance as a tech worker benefiting on outsourcing blame to others, and comfortably giving themselves at the next EA donation meetup).
The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.
But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)
People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.
Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.
It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this
People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.