Dark side of the web

AS the Facebook scandal unfolds, what a terrifying insight it offers into the murky, manipulative world of tax-dodging social media giants and the app designers who feast off the personal data they harvest.

This is a world of psychological warfare, fake news and smears, skilfully planted to spread like cancer through cyberspace for commercial or political ends. Indeed, if this sorry affair has one moral for social media addicts, it must be to think twice before posting a profile or filling in a survey.

As for the Government, it must waste not a moment in making Facebook and Co answerable to the taxman and the law. BREXITEERS and Remainers alike will have been sickened by Jean-Claude Juncker’s oleaginous letter to Vladimir Putin, congratulating the gangster Russian president on his victory in Sunday’s rigged election. In it, he mentioned not a word about the Salisbury nerve agent attack. What a grotesque insult to our country – which, lest he has forgotten, remains a full member and massive net contributor to the EU, for which he purports to speak. This is yet more proof, as if it were needed, of how wise Britain was to vote for Brexit.