Abstract
The concept of fake news was debated very often in recent years, and many studies attended to define and understand the complexity of this phenomenon. In this study we have tried to show that although fabricated news, rumors or conspiracy theories are not an invention of recent years, but they have been present for a long time in the communication field, the efficiency of their spreading through current technology brings new challenges related to the need studying and understanding how they currently circulate in the digital environment. A brief foray into media history shows that fabricated news and hoaxes existed long before social media. Attempts to define the concept of fake news have shown that it is used in public discourse to cover a wide variety of content, this term being used generically for several categories of misleading information.