Is the world so radically different in this regard now? I'm not disagreeing outright, but I still think that lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time. Remember the chain e-mails that were oh so popular prior to social networks? And before that, before electronics, there must have been a lot of bullshit that was spread in the written word on paper and before that by word of mouth. The fake news business is largely the same old thing in new wrapping IMO.

With communication enabling faster communication with greater reach, there might be more noise, but is it worse in terms of percentage of communication?

The feedback loop is much tighter now. The more outrageous a story is, the more people click it, and the more money that story makes. You can immediately measure the effect (the Macedonian teenagers quickly zoomed in to the more gullible Trump supporters, because they made more money).

In the past news sources had a reputation to protect, so crazy stories were confined to tabloids and some radio shows. Now all these stories just pop up in peoples streams, without anything to distinguish them from stories from reliable sources.

Couple that with the fact that, even with trustworthy sources, you can paint an inaccurate picture just by editing which stories you present (which Facebook is incentivised to do and actually does), and I think the problem is much worse now.

The yellow journalism feedback loop of the late 19th century was pretty tight.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

> lies, misinformation and misrepresentation have been a part of human communications since the dawn of time

Yeah, but they were never shrugged off. Even the worst charlatans insisted they speak the truth; they didn't just go "meh, maybe it's not true after all, what is truth anyway".

The fact that "post-truth" was picked as the word of the year for 2016 is very frightening.

Citation?

Edited to add: /s

sure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/po...

and

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-t...

Thanks :) My comment was actually a (poor) attempt at humor. I didn't think it would work if I added /s. Didn't work anyway :)

Hah... I figured it might have been but then again this is the internet so....

Don't worry, it's just "Truthiness" all over again.