The Cambridge Analytica scandal has of course been pivotal, prompting, at the time of going to press, shares to crash by 11 per cent, high-profile advertisers such as Mozilla and Commerzbank to withdraw support and Mark Zuckerberg to go to ground for four days before apologising on CNN after the hashtag #WheresZuck went viral to tell us that he’s ‘really sorry’ and feels ‘really bad’.
But some say the tide began to turn as recently as August 2016. That’s when Zuckerberg, under intense pressure from right-wing news organisations such as Breitbart, fired the supposedly biased humans who curated the site’s ‘Trending News’ section and replaced them with algorithms. Within days, the feed was dominated by fake news items about Hillary Clinton, pushed up the rankings by bots and trolls. We all know where that led.