The big tech backlash

Tech giants are drawing political fire over fake news and Russian meddling

Nicholas Terry understands the internet's darker side better than most. A history lecturer at Exeter University, Terry is an expert on antisemitism and runs a blog examining Holocaust denial and its dissemination online.

"You've got three separate phenomena converging," he says. "One is the fake news stuff, promulgated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which is trying to promote specific false stories in real time for immediate impact; second, there's the ideological bubble - people only reading leftwing or rightwing news sites; and then there's this effort by fringe movements on Holocaust denial to make their websites look respectable and to hoodwink readers into thinking what they're reading is OK."