It's the two word term du jour and Australian politicians are bandying it about with abandon.
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But "Fake news" does not really mean what they think it means.
The term refers to online news stories that look like real news but are based on incorrect information and assertions.
Fake news are not incorrect news stories that are later corrected when more facts come to light nor are they an accident.
They are deliberately written to spread misinformation and often to drive a political agenda.
It is a growing and increasingly profitable industry and the term was so big in 2016 that it was Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year.
It has been around for a while but last November's election took it to a new level after concerns were raised the plethora of fake news sites had helped swing the election result.
Buzzfeed investigated the prevalence of fake news and found that in the final three months of the presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engaged time than the top stories from major news outlets.
"During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook," Buzzfeed reported.
"Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook."
The Los Angeles Times spoke to the founders of one of the most successful fake news operations, LibertyWritersNews.
Two men behind the site went within six months from unemployed restaurant workers to running a website with hundreds of thousands of readers that attracted so much money from advertising the pair were embarrassed by their profits.
Then there was the case of the Macedonian teenagers writing pro Trump fake stories that were chalking up millions of readers and earning the authors a tidy income.
More than 100 domain names – all peddling untrue stories presented as if they were real – were traced to Macedonia.
But these sites are publishing something very different to the kind of "fake news" Australian politicians describe.
On Monday morning Treasurer Scott Morrison described reports of a push inside the Coalition to kickstart the marriage equality debate as "fake news". Fairfax Media stands by its Saturday report that moderate MPs are preparing a push for the Coalition to abandon its policy for a plebiscite on same sex marriage.
Late last year, Resources Minister Matt Canavan took the ABC to task for the same thing in its reporting of the Adani coal mine.
One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts have embraced the phrase with gusto.
Even US President Donald Trump is in on the action and used the same phrase in an attempt to discredit the reports of his phone call with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Politicians know exactly what they are doing when they call something fake news that is not fake news.
It has become a handy put down for politicians when they are asked about stories they do not like – whether it's stories that contain facts they do not want to address or issues they just do not want to talk about.
Using the term is a form of dog whistling, of stoking people's scepticism of traditional news media by suggesting that they are just making something up.
A politician accusing a newspaper or television station of fake news is a new way of attacking the media and one journalists have not yet begun to counter.
Instead of letting the accusation stand, reporters need to demand politicians produce evidence that the news they do not like is fake.
Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of Snopes, an American rumour-debunking site, says the best way to counter fake news is with real news.
"We have also always had this misinformation, we've always had propaganda, we've always had disinformation, and we've always had BS," she told The Atlantic.
"I do think fake news is always going to be part of the media and information ecosystem. I just think it needs to be balanced out by actual news. We have to bolster the immune system of journalism, because that's going to be the only way out of this possible authoritarianism and inundation with fake news."
