The term "fake news" is so broad and fraught with ideological positioning, linguistic overreach, and self-righteous, naïve realism that it really ought to be banned. It does not do what it seemingly intends to do, which is to make people more critical of what they read and share; it does the opposite, just labeling sources as bad or good, which is as close to propaganda as it gets.
A more nuanced classification than the "fake news/good news" binary is sorely needed.
It seems like a bad science yes, or perhaps editorialized by media. And completely unexpected that all information proliferation follow power laws. If they were comparing different categories of information (political, rage bait, technical discussions, neutral boring news) etc they could say something interesting. But this is such a narrow focus on a mostly value judgment based class of misinformation. It would be much more interesting to know how certain types of information differ from each other in terms of topological properties.
A more nuanced classification than the "fake news/good news" binary is sorely needed.