Fake news is an epidemic that’s out of control – and we all need to be inoculated

Never mind the 3 million falling for online fraudsters, says Alan Rusbridger, where’s the campaign of information to help the 20-plus million of us who are being assailed daily by a digital thicket of disinformation, trolls, bias, lies and deep fakes?

I asked a bunch of smart 19-year-olds if they recognised any newspaper owners. One or two had heard of an abstract figure called Rupert Murdoch... (PA)

Stop. Think. Fraud. You may well have seen or heard the Home Office advert in recent weeks that’s trying to educate us in all the ways online crooks are out to cheat us.

They seem so plausible, these cyber crooks, as they try to trick us into handing over our passwords, bank details, PIN numbers, identities and cash. The website tells us that one in 17 adults in England and Wales were victims of fraud in one year – nearly 3 million of us.

That’s a lot of people, but a drop in the ocean compared with the number of us being fooled and deceived in other ways. One respected survey showed that nearly two-thirds of us can no longer tell the difference between good journalism and falsehood. Around the same are finding it harder to tell if a piece of news was produced by a respected news organisation.