Should Mark Zuckerberg tell you the truth? I don’t mean should he be honest if you were to find yourself — unlikely, I know — in conversation with the billionaire co-founder of Facebook. No, I mean should Zuckerberg be responsible for ensuring that what you read on your newsfeed is truthful and balanced? In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, this has become a burning political issue on both sides of the Atlantic.

The allegation aimed at Facebook and other social media behemoths is that they allow millions of people to surround themselves with information that simply confirms their own prejudices. Facebook users, so the critics allege, are not exposed to alternative viewpoints and world views. Worse, outright lies and fabricated news assume the status of truth on Facebook feeds.

Some analysts have claimed that fake election news stories and hyperpartisan blogs — many of them in support of Trump, some from servers located in unlikely places such as Macedonia — were more popular on Facebook in the closing stages of the Presidential campaign than mainstream news outlets. Two of the most widely shared hoax stories were that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton had sold arms to IS. Yes, really.

As the liberal, east coast/west coast establishment in America absorbs the shock of the Trump victory, Facebook stands accused of swinging the election in The Donald’s direction. Paul Horner, a 38-year-old impresario of multiple fake news hoaxes on Facebook, has even declared that “I think Trump is in the White House because of me”. Action is now being demanded against hoax news sites.

Some are even suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg should ensure that Facebook’s algorithms which organise the prominence of news stories according to the preferences of each user should be altered to insert posts the user wouldn’t normally like. This, claim Facebook’s critics, would force its users to be exposed to a “balanced” diet of news and would compel them to peek at the world beyond their own self-absorbed information bubble.

Enough. The mixture of sanctimony, humbug and old-fashioned “shoot the messenger” blame is getting out of hand.

I’m not especially bedazzled by Facebook. While I have good friends who work at the company, I actually find the messianic Californian new-worldy-touchy-feely culture of Facebook a little grating. Nor am I sure that companies such as Facebook really pay all the tax they could — though that’s as much the fault of governments who still haven’t got their tax act together. And I think it’s ridiculous that self-confessed liars such as Mr Horner appear to have earned good money through Facebook advertising arrangements. Google, Facebook and others have said they are going to take action against hoax news sites. About time too.

But spare me the sanctimony of traditional news outlets who raise their hands in horror at the supposed lack of objectivity of people’s Facebook pages. Whilst most of the bile in the US aimed at Facebook presently comes from the liberal Left, in the UK it’s the Right-wing Brexit newspapers who have Zuckerberg in their sights. Pretending — laughably — to be paragons of dispassionate balance, they criticise Facebook for failing to serve the public. But forcing Facebook users to be exposed to news they don’t like is as daft as suggesting that a Daily Mail reader should be forced by their newsagent to read the Guardian once a week, or Ukip supporters should be obliged to read this column every other Monday. What next? Should vegetarians be compelled to eat meat once a month, just to make absolutely sure they still don’t fancy it?

The reality is we’ve always lived in bubbles. Humans are intensely social animals. We choose friends, hobbies, neighbourhoods, holidays, cars, clothes, music, books, films, newspapers, wine, beer and jokes to reinforce our own identities. Everything we do is, in some way, a reflection of who we think we are and what we aspire to be. The British class system is one of the world’s most resilient examples of stratified social “bubbles” outside India’s caste system.

So let’s not shoot the messenger. If people don’t like the fact that lots of Trump supporters believed the poisonous bile spread about Hillary Clinton, it’s not Zuckerberg’s fault. Don’t ask him to play God with people’s opinions. The fault, such as it is, is that faith in open democratic debate is now so threadbare and cynicism about politicians so rampant, that lies are more readily believed than before. No wonder Oxford Dictionaries declared last week that “post-truth” is its international word of the year.

Not that fibbing in politics is new. Rulers from Henry VIII to Richard Nixon have consistently fibbed their way through power. Mark Twain famously declared that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”.

'People believe things if they feel right. The heart is a stronger organ than the brain' Nick Clegg

What is new, perhaps, is that we thought we’d moved on. With the advances in science, information technology and education there was a reasonable expectation that it would be harder, not easier, for politicians to make stuff up and get away with it. That is why people were so shocked at Donald Trump’s brazen fibs about Mexicans and Muslims, or Boris Johnson’s cheerily fabricated £350 million for the NHS emblazoned on that famous Brexit battle bus. Even Boris’s understudy, Zac Goldsmith, is at it. He’s claiming that a vote for him in the Richmond by election will stop Heathrow expansion, when everyone knows the election is happening because he failed to stop the Conservatives from backing Heathrow in the first place.

So maybe the fault partly rests with those of us who just assumed that reason, data, evidence and science would speak for itself. Maybe us liberals forgot that people believe things if they feel right. The heart is a stronger organ than the brain. And populists know how to appeal to emotions in a way reasonable, measured liberals almost never do. So the politics of moderation needs to pack a bigger emotional punch. That’s our problem — not Mark Zuckerberg’s.