Much has been said over the last couple of years about the extent of fake news and its threat to democracy.

Even though fake news has existed for quite some time in one form or another—yellow journalism, tabloids, false or fabricated click-bait—it is only now, in the age of social media, that people of various stripes deem it a threat to our way of life. According to the European Commission, 83% of European citizens see fake news as a danger to democracy.

I suppose that’s why, in 2016, Obama mentioned to the White House Frontiers Conference that “we’re going to have to build within this Wild Wild West some kind of curating function that people can agree to”. According to Adam Entou of the LA Times, “two months before Trump's inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.”

It is further disconcerting that other western nations have threatened government intervention into Facebook—a service reportedly used by one-third of the planet—using “fake news” as the common rallying cry. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau threatened strict government regulation. French President Macron promisedthe same, suggesting to ban it during election time. A new law in Germany, pushed by Merkel, took effect on January 1st, threatening social media companies with vast penalties if they did not censor illegal opinions. Twitter has already moved to block the posts of members of opposition parties in that country, lest they pay the price. All of this based on the shifty, untenable claim that fake news is a threat to our liberal democracies.

We know it is humbug, if not a concerted lie. Those who misrepresent both fake news and democracy the most turn out to be the ones who want to regulate it. The idea alone reeks of oily doublespeak, and private companies and individuals alike should have none of it.

A greater threat to democracy is government censorship and the state regulation of public and private opinion, freedom of speech, the freedom of information, the freedom of the press, and the freedom to associate with whomever we please. Besides, a government that does not protect the civil rights of its citizens, but actively suppresses them, is no longer liberal anyways, and belongs in the political landfill with monarchism, theocracy, and...Marxism?

Yes, Marxism. All of it sounds suspiciously like China’s campaign against “rumors”, a term which can encompass everything from speculation, unverified commentary, and false information posted online. Rumors are treated like weapons, drugs or disease, sure to destabilize the country.

In 2009, the Chinese censors were introducing blacklists in order to exclude journalists who engage in “unhealthy professional conduct” from news reporting and editing. These regulations were required to “resolutely half fake news”

In 2011, Hu Zhanfan, who the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party appointed head of the state-run CCTV, “officially” said this of fake news before getting his shiny new position:

The third and underlying root reason for fake news was the question of the Marxist View of Journalism (马克思主义新闻观). A number of news workers have not defined their own role in terms of the propaganda work of the Party, but rather have defined themselves as journalism professionals, and this is a fundamentally erroneous role definition. Strengthening education in the Marxist View of Journalism and raising the quality and character of news teams is not just very necessary, it is a matter of extreme urgency.

... fake news and false reports (失实报道) not only damage the reputation of news journalists and the credibility of the media, but they also hamper, interfere with and destroy guidance of public opinion, damaging social order and economic order and seriously and even directly impacting social stability. For the media, winning the trust of the people is a project that will take years and years, built up through report after report. But the emergence of a single false report can extinguish everything that has been gained.

...the first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool (当好喉舌工具). This is the most core content of the Marxist View of Journalism, and it is the most fundamental of principles.

Sound familiar? The same excuse, the same double speak, the same canard of fake news, can be used to defend totalitarian, Marxist-Leninist states as well as it can liberal democracies. I suspect the Chinese propaganda machine is at least more honest in its intentions. But given that the Chinese are further along in their war against fake news and “rumors”, and propose the same solutions, we can see where our own battles are ultimately headed.

I didn't really made an extensive search about the fake news subject. Taking that in consideration, my perspective is that this was a way, corporate media found to put the bad apples in one basket so people, the society, believe that the other basket have good apples. I believe they're all bad apples that shouldn't been eaten, they're all rotten, some more, some less.