We've made "fake news" to mean exactly what Trump makes it to mean: "News I don't like."
There was fake news. Utterly made up. No basis in truth, or such a slight basis as to be divorced from reality. Few people saw it; those who saw it seem not to be able to remember the difference between the "real fake news" and fake news made up for a study. In other words, it left very little impression, and most of those who saw it were unaffected by it, when it comes to their vote.
Then there's scandalous real news that is utterly meaningless but is crucial because says something true and bad about somebody we don't like. That's the HRC emails. That's the DNC emails. Nobody's saying that HRC didn't have her own server; nobody's saying that those checking into whether her mail was secure or not didn't do so. The DNC emails released weren't fictitious; they were real, they were true, they were irrelevant. Most of the news reported like this was scandalous and titillating, and since it said something we wanted to justify our actions we believed it was important. Nobody believed a lie.
Now, many of the fake news sites were from Central Europe and some from Eastern Europe (please note that "Eastern Europe" a la 1970s and 1980s is a political construct that no longer exists; "eastern Europe" is really just Russia, perhaps BR and Ukr, but those are also a bit sketchy for inclusion in that category). But the vast majority of the news that most Americans got were from CNN, Fox, NPR, NBC, CBS ... These sources ran with all the trivial-but-scandalous news that did the real harm.
Ultimately, though, it wasn't the Russians that "hacked" the electorate with fake news or insignificant scandals, the electorate self-hacked in rushing to judgment and rushing after scandal without thinking. And many Sanders supporters were exactly that, no matter their education and their self-vaunted "critical thinking" skillset. When emotions and a rush for power come along, slow, critical thinking that seeks truth first and foremost and tries to set it in context don't really count for much.
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