not mean that similar things are not going on in other countries even as you read this article. Canadians have good reason to worry about how social media could impact the 2019 federal election. When Facebook and Twitter told MPs last year that they could increase public engagement in the debates between party leaders, some people wondered how much of this would be provided by Russian bots.

Yet the most alarming revelation of the past year is not the importance of Russian fake news, but its unimportance. Former president Barack Obama implicitly acknowledged that in his recent Netflix interview with David Letterman. Having swept into the White House in 2008 as the first candidate of the social media age, Obama acknowledged that he had "missed … the degree to"black op" that exceeded expectations. It was a direct result of the profound change in the public sphere brought about by the advent and spectacular growth of the online network platforms. In many ways, the obsessive focus of the American political class on the Russian sub-plot is a distraction from the alarming reality that – as the European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager argued earlier this month – the big tech companies, and the way their services are used by ordinary people, pose a much bigger threat to democracy. It is the threat from within we really need to worry about – not the threat from Putin.

A polarization problem

We are nearly all addicts. The website eMarketer estimates that adult Facebook users in the United States spent roughly 41 minutes