One of the most important virtues of humanity would be the disposition to take responsibility. Through this we are able to better ourselves, by learning from our past mistakes instead of burying our heads in the sand and making futile efforts to protect the status quo, or by trying to find a scapegoat.It seems that after the tumultuous United States presidential campaigns from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and an equally surprising result in the form of a Republican victory, mainstream media in the U.S. has opted for the second option and pointed a unified finger at social media.We saw the first indications of this blame game some weeks ago and had voiced concerns over it in our Reader's Corner article "Media no longer fourth estate after Trump's victory," published on Nov. 13.Not all social media platforms are under fire, though. Things seem to be alright for Google as Foreign Policy magazine chose the tech giant as the diplomat of the year. For Facebook though, things are far from ideal.Following the Trump win, the media, which was supporting Hillary Clinton and the establishment with all their might, turned its guns toward Facebook and it does not look like it will stop anytime soon, even after two weeks of constant negative news articles. Just two days ago, Buzzfeed published a news article, "Facebook Trending Just Promoted another False Story," one of the latest examples, but is far from being the only one.On Nov. 19, The New York Times Editorial Board published an article titled, "Facebook and the Digital Virus Called Fake News," on the issue, and focused on falsified news articles, gaining quite a traction among like-minded people. Editorial from one of the most influential newspapers in United States can stand testament to how focused mainstream media in America is on this problem. But I can't help but question, why now?After all, even though this problem is now pursued quite vehemently by mainstream media in an attempt that can be called as scapegoating, it is not the first time the issue has emerged. For example, Poynter tried to bring this under attention with its article "Facebook's fake news problem won't fix itself" on Oct. 28 under its Fact-Checking category. We will have more on this later.Just looking at the amount of content on this issue on mainstream media following the election gives the impression of a crusade against Facebook, with constant feed of negative news that channel the anger of Democrats over the loss towards a third party that is not the established media, but was quite culpable in the result.Just checking on a number of news websites would provide you with enough examples. Here is another title from The New York Times, "Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back into China." This was published on Nov 22 and they were not the only one as everyone seems to be on the bandwagon of negative reporting on the Facebook. It's not just the written media, news shows, pundits, debate shows and late-night talk shows have also touched the subject quite often.We have a saying in Turkey roughly translates into "If it is not snowing in İstanbul, it's not snowing in Turkey," and it sort of references the coverage Istanbul, Turkey's largest city get on Turkish media. Even the most minuscule events from İstanbul can find a five-minute airtime in the evening news or a small article in the morning's newspapers, but rest of the country is not that lucky. It appears that same thing is happening in the world. When the political climate in the U.S. suffers from an influx of fake news roaming around in the social media, we suddenly have a universal fake news problem.However, we have been complaining, debating and suffering from the social media sourced fake news in Turkey for years now. It happened during the Gezi Park protests. It happened during various terror attacks and in their aftermath. It happened during Oct. 17-25 and most recently it happened during and after the failed coup attempt on July 15. Many of our articles on these can be found on Daily Sabah and we are far from the only ones who were emphasizing the issue.During Gezi Park protests, there was a social media story along with the picture of a heavily injured man. The picture gained quite traction and outrage among the public as it said that the injuries were the result of a police vehicle which had purposely ran over the victim. Later, it turned out that the picture was from an unrelated incident. There were numerous fake accounts of legitimate news channels that had constantly spawned fake news. Similar fake news sources were seen stirring up chaos in the aftermaths of terror attacks as well.Throughout July 15, fake news were so rampant that even legitimate sources such as Stratfor, Sputnik News, Sunday Express, Washington Post, The Daily Beast and so forth were caught off-guard, publishing and tweeting those news stories.In fact, we have enough examples to fill out another of this article, but these would suffice to drive the point home, and the point is that we constantly reiterated the untenability of the situation where the damage done by fake news stories in the social media is getting beyond the ability of the traditional media sources to correct. Yet, when we emphasized these points our colleagues from western media offered high-handed debates on freedom of speech and thought and cried censorship when state took preventative measures. Nowadays, however, those same colleagues seem to be at the forefront of the line that complains Clinton has lost because of the menace that is fake news.It all seems a bit… hypocritical, does not it?