Anew year’s resolution for all: stop talking about fake news. Perhaps we should have stopped talking about it at the same time as we started. That, according to Google Trends, was the week after Donald Trump won the US presidential election in 2016, which suggests the interest was driven by astonished people looking for an explanation. Fake news was not the only scapegoat but it was, and still is, a popular one. It was even named the Word of the Year in 2017 by Collins Dictionary. Yet the phrase has long since ceased to be useful, and here are five reasons why.

First, fake news doesn’t mean anything — or rather, it means so many different things to different people as to be bewildering. Focus group studies conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that people placed various things under the “fake news” umbrella, including annoying pop-up advertisements, politicians making misleading claims, and newspapers with a political slant.

None of these match the original definition of fake news — at least, as I understand it — which referred to stories that were invented to win advertising clicks and impersonated or parodied genuine journalism. The most famous example was when the Pope was “reported” to have endorsed Mr Trump’s presidential candidacy.