Mike Caulfield provides good food for thought about over generalizing misinformation:
Instead of seeing versions of hearsay (non-institutional systems of news and analysis) as damaging institutional systems, we could choose to see the hearsay system itself as the thing under attack. That is, in the age of social media, a valuable system of non-institutional knowledge is increasingly gameable and gamed, rendered useless by a variety of threats and incentives that are polluting not the institutional space, but the hearsay space.