“Ban the term ‘fake news’,” says the headline of a Sunday post on CNN.com. The story was so weighty it took two people to write it: Hossein Derakhshan, a writer and researcher “on the socio-political impacts of new media technologies,” CNN says, and Claire Wardle, a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

When we use the term “fake news” it is not only self-defeating, it oversimplifies a very complex problem.

A year ago, this wasn’t the case. The term actually meant something. It described a particular type of website that used the same design templates as professional news websites but its contents were entirely fabricated.

But earlier this year, the term started to become meaningless. It became used to describe any piece of information that someone else didn’t like. Increasingly the term has become weaponized by politicians who use it to undermine independent journalism in an effort to reach the public directly through their own channels.

The writers say the problem is worldwide and decry such fake news as “the image of a shark swimming up a Texas highway during Hurricane Harvey.”