Can you believe it? We’ll accept almost anything we’re told

Much of the material that drags the gullible “down the rabbit hole” into ultra-right, anti-vax and anti-Semitic fellowships of fear such as QAnon is created in bedrooms and basements by solo players, men (for they are mostly men) ranging from the teenage prankster through the lonely sexual misfit, via the political wannabe and racist fruitcake to the homicidal sociopath.

Coper is not alone in tracing the origins of this cantankerous kaleidoscope of fury and gullibility to the decline of the mainstream press, and is old enough to recall that “In my household growing up, the morning newspaper was a more dependable appearance at the breakfast table than breakfast”.

While it’s true that the implosion of the classified advertising market has almost gutted the newsrooms of the world, Coper’s thesis in Facts centres on the imitative nature of what’s being served up online. There are headlines that drag you in, pictures that catch the eye, and before you know it, you’re reading the story. Just like in real newspapers.

The similarity ends with this purloining of a tried and true format. Journalism, real journalism, involves checking sources, establishing facts, and getting both sides of the story. Disinformation works by spraying the gloss of a news story onto propaganda, abuse, and hysteria.

Coper’s book is not all doom and gloom, mind you. He outlines strategies to combat the worst manifestations of online manipulation, and pauses to laugh at some ludicrous examples of cyber incompetence. Folks such as Angus Taylor MP, who forgot to switch to a fake Facebook account before congratulating himself on a car park development in an online community group.

But none of this is new – it’s just the technology that’s changed. America today is indeed “a society divided”, but so was France 120 years ago over the Dreyfus Affair.

New fangled contraptions have always brought out the best and the worst in us. We’ll work our way through this one eventually.