Less than seven miles from the White House, where President Trump has popularized the term "fake news," residents in a suburban Maryland library gathered recently to learn how to not be duped themselves.

“Social media is a common theme here because you see things being shared over and over again,” Ryan O’Grady, media producer and director of the Maryland State Library Resource Center, told the audience. “Just because something is popular doesn’t make it true.”

The program, which O’Grady is running at several libraries in Maryland’s Montgomery County, is in response to the recent explosion of unverified, unsourced and sometimes untrue information that purports itself as news. The program aims to educate residents about how to spot fake news.

While it's not a recent phenomenon -- the Bigfoot myth goes back centuries, and fabricated stories abounded when emailing was new, for example -- fake news played a prominent role in the 2016 presidential election and continues to do so in the new administration. Sites like Facebook and Twitter give fake news outlets a platform to reach more people than they would otherwise be able to. Once the misinformation is out there, it can spread quickly, often before users even read or verify a story