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Jimmy Savile to be brought back from the dead to run a children’s home would be a shock headline in any newspaper and wouldn’t be believed.

If it was put up by one of the numerous fake news websites on Facebook or other social media sites it would not only be believed, it would go viral and be deemed to be true by morning.

Well, they believed the Pope was backing Trump. That’s how the world of fake news works and is probably one of the reasons America is going to have a President who is a living lie.

Maybe it’s fitting this Lying King should be the leader of the free world in what they are calling a Post-Truth society.

It has also emerged that fake news stories got more shares and likes during the US presidential campaign than true ones.

Oxford English Dictionaries made Post-Truth their word of the year and its definition is where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal beliefs”.

(Image: Ivan Parfenie / YouTube)

We look on in disbelief at how ordinary rational Americans could believe a billionaire tax avoider, who trampled on the rights of workers and small business people, could be on their side.

Anyone who took a few minutes to check out online what Donald Trump has done and said in the past would know straight away he is a brazen liar who is a rock-solid part of the same establishment he wants to bring down.

Here’s where the Post-Truth bit comes in because most of those who voted for Trump were not interested in letting “objective facts” stand in the way of their emotions and personal beliefs.

The supreme irony is these same people allow themselves be fed false news, yet despise legitimate news services which endeavour to tell the truth.

Indeed some Trump supporters at his rallies were decked out in T-shirts calling for journalists to be lynched simply because they questioned the lies of their leader.

(Image: REUTERS)

They seldom read a newspaper. Instead they go online to get their news from the likes of The Angry Patriot, Right Alerts and Fed-Up Americans.

They used to say the truth is out there, but not in the world of social media where lies can become facts overnight.

During the presidential campaign a bogus report was put out the Pope had endorsed Trump but by the time it was proven false it had been shared nearly one million times.

There is evidence emerging the top 20 fake news stories during the presidential campaign collectively outperformed the top 20 legitimate stories in terms of shares and comments.

They used to warn about not believing everything you read in the papers but the reality is you can scarcely believe anything you read online and there goes your proof.

What we’ve seen in recent weeks is a new dark age when it comes to truth because there are a lot of ordinary people who obviously prefer ignorance to enlightenment.

Now we know how poor old Galileo felt when he ended up before the Inquisition for pointing out the bleedin’ obvious that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around.

Unfortunately in the Post-Truth world it is just as difficult to put actual facts across simply because people do not want to believe them. We also have the irony of a President-elect who is forever accusing the media of lying when much of the time he is estranged from the truth himself.

I believe there is now a real danger Trump will follow the example of his pal Putin and launch a campaign to put pressure on newspapers and TV stations who dare to report negative stories about him.

Truth is Donald Trump’s number one enemy is truth. For him it is garlic to a vampire because his entire election campaign is based on untruths.

It had been hoped when it dawned on him he was actually going to be the President of the United States he’d moderate his extremist views but, with the appointment of his controversial cabinet, the opposite seems to be the case.

Some of them have said some dreadful things in the past about minorities and gay people while groups which have backed his election are outright Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

To think that back in the day we thought the then World Wide Web would make the world a more democratic place.

We were worried democracy was under threat from outside forces, then thanks to social media it goes out and kills itself on November 8.

With some of the racist groups now backing Trump, the internet cable is in danger of becoming the new lynching rope.