From an Inside the Times story featuring Blake Hounshell, Sheera Frenkel, Tiffany Hsu, and Stuart A. Thompson headlined “Wading in the Swamps of Falsehoods”:

“Fake news” has gone from a hot buzzword popularized during the 2016 presidential campaign to an ever-present phenomenon known more formally as misinformation or disinformation.

Whatever you call it, sowing F.U.D. — fear, uncertainty and doubt — is now a full-time and often lucrative occupation for the malign foreign actors and even ordinary U.S. citizens who try to influence American politics by publishing information they know to be false.