Disinformation, propagated on the internet, influenced last year’s US presidential election. The degree of influence is impossible to gauge with precision, of course, but there is no denying the vast scale of malicious attempts by the Internet Research Agency — a Kremlin-linked troll farm — to sway US public opinion. Revelations on that subject in US congressional hearings this week should give pause to anyone who cares about democracy.

Among these were Facebook’s acknowledgment that 150m Americans, including Instagram users, may have viewed at least one post of fake news originating with the Russian agency, which took out a total of 3,000 paid ads. That figure says much about the evolution of the media landscape. A few platforms can now reach audiences of previously unimaginable size.

In the 13 years since then undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook as a college networking site, the company has grown to become the largest global distributor of news, both real and fake. That ascent comes with responsibility. Social media platforms on this scale, for all the good they can do, can be weaponised — in some cases by hostile state actors.