Take a look at who is denouncing fake news the loudest: Assad & his stable of paid propagandists to claim Syria & Russia are bombing terrorists, not civilians; Trump, who operates concentration camps for little kids & other refugees & is commander-in-chief of at least seven wars; Putin, engaged in at least two wars, in annexing Crimea, & supporting & arming the Rohingya & Kashmiri genocides; Modi, on a genocidal tear in Kashmir, pogroms against Muslims & oppressed castes in India, & who just disenfranchised two million Muslims in Assam as ‘illegal immigrants’; Stalinist hacks opposing the Hong Kong protests as ‘US regime-change operations’ & who scoff with contempt & denial of the Rohingya & Uyghur genocides.
There has always been fake news mostly promulgated by governments to cover their war & human rights crimes. Part of growing up is learning how to distinguish what is real from what are lies. The point of these extreme rightwing politicians & their stooges denouncing fake news is to create nihilism, conspiracy thinking, confusion, conformity with the oppressors. Nihilism is the ideology of fascism that claims nothing can be known, everything is a lie except what these governments & their propaganda hacks say is real.