Criticising Big Tech can feel redundant at a time when many chief executives in Silicon Valley are doing such a good job of making the public sceptical about their business models and their executive competence all by themselves.

Even so, Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University and his testimony on Capitol Hill last week are worthy of note. Facebook insists it does not want to be responsible for false political advertising. So I’d like to help Mr Zuckerberg out by fact checking a few of the points of disinformation in his own communications.

Let’s put aside the total non-starters — like the fact that a man who has become a billionaire via surveillance capital— the industrial-scale monetisation of personal data — invokes the civil rights leaders Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King in his efforts to avoid appropriate regulation. Instead let’s start with Mr Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is part of the “fifth estate”.