ABSTRACT
Fake news is not a recent phenomenon, as is often believed. Posetti and Matthews (2018) claim that mobilising and manipulating information was a feature of history long before modern journalism established standards that define news as a genre based on particular rules of integrity. The perpetrator became Augustus, the first Roman Emperor and “fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all.” However, they further point out that the weaponization of information on an unprecedented scale has taken effect only in recent years primarily due to the new technology, especially social networks that are often exploited by anti-democratic governments, populist politicians and dishonest corporate entities. The conventional news report as a genre has been well-established for a long time with its unique and typical communicative purpose of objectively reporting everyday happenings in the world.
