Sick of fake news? Have no fear. The MPs of the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee are on the case. Whatever it takes to defeat this insidious threat to our democracy, they’re ready. And if that requires them to undertake a taxpayer-funded jaunt to the United States, so be it. Today they arrived in Washington DC, to speak to executives from Google, YouTube and Facebook. The big guns of the digital world. These were seriously important people.

Well, I say people. They certainly looked like people. But they didn’t talk like people. They talked like highly sophisticated robots. And bearing in mind the technological capabilities these firms possess, it’s more than likely that that’s what they were.

In both tone and content, the exec-bots’ answers sounded pre-recorded, automated, programmed. There was no um-ing and ah-ing, no pausing for thought, no attempts at humour or matiness. Instead MPs were subjected to an uninterrupted monotone of management jargon.

“Law enforcement can request information from us pursuant to their investigations,” MPs were told. “The trust that users have in our services is reliant on us providing a high-quality news experience,” they learnt. They heard about “the dynamics of the ecosystem”, and the need to “address these issues at scale”. They were even confronted with the phrase “news and other verticals”.