Turbo-charged hot takes make a mockery of our 'information age'

Complexity is now a dirty word, but this is no way for our society to work

- David Aaronovitch

An American friend told me recently of how, following the death of president Jimmy Carter, YouTube's algorithm had sent him an excerpt from one of the three presidential debates from 1976, when Carter defeated the incumbent Republican Gerald Ford. This one had been all about foreign policy. "It was extraordinary," said my friend. "They debated the status of the Panama Canal for 16 minutes.

Can you imagine that happening now?" No, I couldn't. Running up to November's presidential election there was just that one debate with Kamala Harris - the one in which Trump claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. It was only after his victory that Trump unveiled his undebated determination to take control of a waterway which runs through a sovereign foreign nation.

But who cares, right? Because aren't we beyond all this detailed debating stuff? As the sudden furore over the grooming gangs grew, it became horribly clear to those of us who have been following the scandal for well over a decade - 13 years in which there have been newspaper campaigns, TV dramas and a series of inquiries (some very high profile) - that many of those now most angry about it simply hadn't been taking any notice of this coverage.

One result was that the very people who had reported on it were now widely being accused on social media of covering it up, and Sir Keir Starmer, the politician who as a prosecutor had been most vigorous about pursuing the rapists, was being called a rape enabler.