Here in 2017, Donald Trump has turned “fake news” into an insult lobbed at real news organizations publishing accurate information. But there’s also the problem of what might confusingly be called “real fake news”—as in, false reports that are often intended to deceive. For example, made-up news is being published by people like Cameron Harris, who set out to grab the attention of Trump supporters who had a “severe distrust of the media” by fabricating stories about Hillary Clinton that looked like news (but weren’t) on a website that looked like a legit newspaper (but wasn’t). Why would a person do such a thing? Harris told The New York Times he made tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue because of all the traffic to his site.

All the while, Trump is tweeting and tweeting and tweeting—not because he likes to, he insisted in an interview with Fox & Friends this week, but because, “I get very dishonest media, very dishonest press, and it’s my only way that I can counteract.” (Nevermind that a strong majority of people in the United States—69 percent of those surveyed in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll—believe Trump’s use of Twitter is a bad thing.)

So while Bryan had a paper through which he spoke every week, Trump has Twitter. The two men are political kindred spirits, as my colleague David Frum has pointed out. A difference in preferred publishing technologies aside, both of them aimed to delegitimize the press—an institution already bogged down with the complexities of an actual and pervasive problem with fake news. Defining “fake news” then was as slippery as it is today: People used the term to describe well-intentioned but inaccurate reports, political propaganda, partisanship, ethically questionable profit-driven journalism, and more.

“It could not be foreseen that a time would come when a partisan press would seek to mislead the people,” a columnist lamented for The Davenport Daily Republican in 1896. “It could not be foreseen that a time would come when whole columns of fake news would be published, that whole columns of sensational stuff would be printed and read.”

Deceptions included the “miserable fake news,” that Bryan had won the election, according to a 1896 story in the Iola Register, of Kansas. It’s not clear from the story where that misinformation was published, only that the fake news had spread across town: “There were pale faces; there was numbness… So terrible was the shock in some places that yesterday men looked as if they had just been saved from some deadly peril and were still wondering how they escaped.”

Back then, as today, people didn’t know quite what to do about fake news.

The Constitutional right to free press makes it blessedly difficult to legislate the flow of information—even questionable information. And the people who willfully deceive others with made-up stories don’t seem to care about the harm they cause.