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Fake news is increasingly understood to be a security issue. This suggests the need for research asking what fake news is, and why fake news imitates the news genre. Why are fake news employed as tools in influence campaigns? Questions like these prompted this study. The questions that followed, and that the report attempts to answer, are: What are the similarities and differences between news and fake news, and can the imitation of traits associated with the news genre facilitate influence? And if so – how? This study is premised on genre theory. The theoretical framework treats genre not simply as a collection of formal and linguistic means for adding esthetic value to the text, but as a location within which meaning is made possible. Reading and understanding a text – or receiving any kind of discourse – necessitates cooperation between the sender and the receiver, called a reading contract. The author sends the reader signals through genre conventions that tell the reader of the motive for the text. This motive decides which reading contract is appropriate, and distinguishes genres from each other. The motive associated with the news genre is to uphold the journalistic mission by contributing to public knowledge, distributing true, important, and new information. In contrast, the motive tied to the fake news genre is to deceive the reader into believing that the fake news story is a news story, that the sender is a journalist seeking to comply with journalistic ideals, and that the content of the story has been privy to journalistic procedures. As the motives behind the news story and the fake news story, respectively, are fundamentally different, they should be treated as separate genres. This is not always easy, as fake news, by definition, seek to deceive the reader. The deception attempt consists of mimicking the esthetic traits of the news genre. On the surface, then, a news story and a fake news story can seem identical. For the news genre, the esthetic traits serve to invite the reader to enter into a fact contract that the journalist, on his or her end, seeks to honor. For the fake news genre, the esthetic traits are supposed to get the reader to enter into a fact contract with a fake news producer who does not honor such a contract; in this case, the appropriate contract to enter into would have been the fiction contract. Should the reader chose to enter into a fact contract with a fake news producer, it would constitute a deception of the reader. The report finds that news and fake news share esthetic genre traits, but are defined by fundamentally different motives, and thus constitute two separate genres. Further, the report finds that mimicking the traits of the news genre might facilitate influence through fake news by inviting the reader to enter into a fact contract instead of the appropriate contract – the fiction contract. Understanding fake news as a genre of its own – rather than a form of discourse that can be likened to poor journalism or satire – has implications for both the study of fake news as a phenomenon, and for the study of countering the potential effect of fake news.