'Fake news' takes advantage of something much more simple. People believe what they want to believe. In other words the people led on by fake news tend to already want to believe what the news is about. When we see something that confirms our biases, many of us don't question it. And this is made even worse since people tend to work as apologists for fake news from sources they like, so instead of being able to discuss the issue of fake news - it ends up dividing people into splits on the 'fake' topic at hand, which in contemporary times is most often political.

Well, yeah, that's what I was referring to. If you perceive someone as being from your tribe then you are predisposed to believe what they say, and if you don't then you aren't. Nowadays tribes are much bigger than they used to be, and tend to center around ideologies more than geography. But otherwise it's monkeysphere dynamics at work.