It was mid-2016, and Buzzfeed's media editor, Craig Silverman, noticed a funny stream of completely made-up stories that seemed to originate from one small Eastern European town.
"We ended up finding a small cluster of news websites all registered in the same town in Macedonia called Veles," Silverman recalls.
He and a colleague started to investigate, and shortly before the US election they identified at least 140 fake news websites which were pulling in huge numbers on Facebook.
The young people in Veles may or may not have had much interest in American politics, but because of the money to be made via Facebook advertising, they wanted their fiction to travel widely on social media. The US presidential election - and specifically Donald Trump - was (and of course still is) a very hot topic on social media.
And so the Macedonians and other purveyors of fakery wrote stories with headlines such as "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President" and "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide".
They were completely false. And thus began the modern - and internet-friendly - life of the phrase "fake news".
The origins of the term 'Fake News" began with a Buzzfeed expose of websites who were deliberately making up stories out of whole cloth as clickbait.
I've been watching the evolution of the usage of the term with Donald Trump. And it is instructive in the art of propaganda. He started out attacking what he claimed were 'fake news stories', but that has morphed into an attack on the Fake News Media.
Donald Trump's thumbs wrote:The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.
What I think is happening the gradual progression 'fake news' to 'the Fake News Media'. When you can get people to believe in 'the Fake News Media', is fake, you condition your followers to disbelieve that all news coming out of sources which are not friendly, because they are the 'enemy of the people' and their coverage is automatically 'fake'. Facts no longer matter, the source of the story matters.
That is an Orwellian view of facts. The irony is that the website that first uncovered the origins of the original fake news would probably be called a 'Fake News Website' by the President.