If there’s no such thing as objectivity, there’s still impartiality. And fact checkers can’t even manage that. They were meant to bring back the rigour that had been throttled out of journalism. Instead, they’re most comprised of sweaty 23-year-olds in graduate jobs rummaging through the usual partisan sources, then comparing them with the often progressive-partisan fact mills of Wikipedia then spitting out the appropriate Woozle. No wonder many have intuited that a red flag from a fact checker actually denotes “things that might be true but are unsayable in the present climate”.

One solution proposed by the Cornell duo of Williams and Ceci involves leaning into that polarised political climate. Rather than having a single set of fact checkers, you should have two rival teams, recruited precisely for their ideological differences. But even here, the authors are quite gloomy in their prognosis. We shouldn’t imagine that this will get us to the “truth”, they warn. But it will at least reveal the underlying human biases that might be skewing our perception of it.

That might turn out to be a more useful function than they realise. The problem that confronts all of us is to neither lapse into cynicism about the existence of facts, nor slip into hubris about our ability to see them. In order to do that, we need to treat fact-checkers not as arbiters, but as just another branch of the media-political system that it seeks to impose its writ upon.