IF ‘post-truth’ was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016, ‘fake news’ must be a qualifier for 2017.

While post-truth means real facts have less impact on shaping public opinion than emotion, fake news omits the facts completely.

As a former journalist, and now an MP, it’s noticeable how both are influencing public life.

This week, I saw for myself how the crowd size at the demonstration against Mr Trump in Parliament Square was exaggerated considerably by several news outlets.

I recall one report claiming there were 6,000 people.

Having attended a recent rally of Royal Marines in the square, I’d estimate the number was less than 2,000.

Inaccuracies or blatant lies are easily dispersed today via social media which, in turn, can whip up hysteria quite unnecessarily.

Facebook alone has an audience of 1.8 billion people.

And rumours spread like wildfire on sites like Twitter, because true or not, links are given the same weighting, regardless of source.

Buzz Feed’s head of data describes the resulting stories as: “Not-fake-but-not-completely-true information.”

To Facebook’s credit, they have now begun a fact-checking service and tag contentious pages with the warning: “Disputed by third party fact-checkers.”

Google and other browsers are doing the same.

It’s about time.

The power of social media is now so great that those providing it must take more responsibility for the output.

Misinformation raises tensions, I suspect on occasions intentionally.

For political leaders, fake news is a distraction that takes up much valuable time.

Mr Trump, on the other hand, is accused by of pushing out his own.

If he is, I would not advise it.

It’s a dangerous game.