Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?

Whether you’re left, right or just somewhere vaguely in between, wherever you’re coming from you may well have a sense that things are somehow not quite right, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that our various problems and crises seem to be multiplying. You may well have concluded that this is because our institutions have been taken over by an out-of-touch elite who run the government, the judiciary, the media and goodness knows what else, and that the only way to discover the real truth is to do your own research, which involves scrolling through the internet because you no longer trust the ‘mainstream media’.

If so, without knowing it, according to James Ball, you have been infected by QAnon. In this brilliant, wide-ranging, if rather uneven, account, Ball argues that all sorts of conspiracy theories, originally bred in the depths of chat rooms, bulletin boards and what he calls ‘digital reservoirs’, have gradually found their way into everyday mainstream culture, and that – unless prevented from spreading – they will continue to cause massive damage to our democratic system.