2016, 128 million Americans created nearly 10 billion Facebook posts, shares, likes and comments about the election. Remember how many Russian ads there were? That's right: a paltry 3,000.

According to new research by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter, roughly one in four Americans saw at least one false story in the run-up to the presidential election. But fake stories were just 1 per cent of the news Hillary Clinton supporters read, and 6 per cent of the news Trump supporters read.

Remember, too, that not all the Russian-sourced news was fake. The tens of thousands of e-mails hacked from the accounts of John Podesta and other Democrats were as real as they were confidential. But itmore be unborn than the new kind of politics born when television revealed how much better-looking John F. Kennedy was than sweaty Richard Nixon, with his five o'clock shadow. Or how easily Lyndon Johnson could make Barry Goldwater seem like a man who wanted to drop atomic bombs on little children.

There are now two kinds of politicians in this world: the kind that know how to use social media as a campaign tool and the ones who lose elections. All over the world, the distinction is clear. The populists of the right and of the left understand the power of social media. The moderates who occupy the centre ground, with few exceptions – Justin "Selfie" Trudeau is one of them – are still playing by 1990s rules.

Among the