Fake news on the internet is at this point a tool that has been widely used for probably at least twenty years. The history of propaganda is much older.

A big part of the problem is social networks treating very non authoritative sources as if they are authoritative based on all sorts of factors that can be manipulated or based on financial gain (somebody pais to get their content promoted).

Users of these tools include lobby groups, nation states, politicians, criminals, scammers, etc. Anyone interested in promoting their cause, sowing FUD about other people's causes, spreading misinformation, or distracting from inconvenient but accurate information.

We'll always have people like that. But we might want to think about getting better tools to deal with them. I prefer getting my news from reputable sources instead of random clickbait distributors or whatever. Keeping track of reputation for domains, people, etc. is currently hard. I don't think it's necessarily a technical problems. We've had the tools to digitally sign stuff for decades. But we're not using them effectively. People can't be bothered to sign their emails, documents, photos, articles, etc. The tools to add and check those signatures are not there or an afterthought at best.