The fake news problem has existed for quite a while, and it's only because of the election that it finally gained serious notoriety. Facebook, Google andother search engines had this problem for years where dozens of fake news pages popped up all over the place but neither of them had consistent traffic, at least not enough to cause an impact.

Until Election 2016.

Look at this, for example - https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilver...-trump-misinfo