There are many reasons to want to go back to early 2016 – not least the fact that Rupert Murdoch was still tweeting his views of the world rather than leaving it to the minions in his global media empire. In these intervening bleak years, Twitter has been enlivened by the almost constant posts of a man Murdoch has called “my friend, Donald J Trump”.

In power, Trump has favoured Murdoch’s media outlets, granting interviews to his Fox News TV channel and his first post-election foreign newspaper interview to the Times. But now, thanks to Fire and Fury, the explosive new book on the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, we know a bit more about what Murdoch really thinks of his fellow billionaire. After a call in which they discussed immigration and Silicon Valley, Murdoch is reported to have put the phone down on Trump and said: “What a fucking idiot.”

I defy anyone to read Wolff’s account of that conversation (Wolff has previously written a biography of Murdoch) without thinking that somehow an Alec Baldwin sketch from Saturday Night Live had snuck into the author’s interview notes. After Murdoch asks how Trump’s meeting with Silicon Valley executives went, Trump drawls: “Oh, great, just great. These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favourable to them, too much regulation.” You can almost hear the splutter as the president praises Murdoch’s corporate enemies before going on to try to explain how he could approve visas for tech executives but ban them for everyone else.

Michael Wolff's explosive book on Trump: the key revelations Read more

But this section runs counter to most of the book, which shows that, at 86 and after four decades in the US, Murdoch has the sort of access to the White House he has long enjoyed in Downing Street. There are the frequent, often daily, calls and advice. In a line hard to dislodge from the mind, Roger Ailes, the late Fox News chief, says: “Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.”

Suggestions that Trump’s admiration for Murdoch wasn’t entirely reciprocated date from before Trump’s selection as the Republican nominee for president. In July 2015 after Trump had questioned John McCain’s war heroics, Murdoch tweeted that he should stop “embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country”. A memo from Murdoch’s sons saying 21st Century Fox was “founded by – and comprising at all levels of the business – immigrants” was seen as criticism of the president’s plan to ban travellers from Muslim countries.

However, Murdoch’s US papers, particularly the Wall Street Journal, have been solidly pro-Trump. Meanwhile, the president lent his support for the proposed Disney-Fox merger, calling it good for jobs, while threatening to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

The men have a long history and Murdoch’s relationship with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, is close enough to have led to Ivanka being appointed trustee of a fund for Murdoch’s youngest children.

This episode proves once again that Murdoch never lets his personal feelings get in the way of good business.

Facebook’s dictatorial policies

Questions about deals between political leaders and the Murdoch media empire have been around for decades. But in recent weeks attention has also been focused on deals between Facebook and the state. In the latest case, Facebook deleted the accounts of Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Facebook declines to say why it deletes certain political accounts, but not others Read more

Although Kadyrov is on the US sanctions list, having been accused of extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses, so are lots of despots, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Yet the latter’s grinning face still beams out from his Facebook page, as does that of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who was hit with sanctions by the US treasury department last summer.

Asked why different rules applied, Facebook told the New York Times it had a “legal obligation” to disable Kadyrov’s accounts. But there is no public record to explain the definition.

A lack of transparency has bedevilled old media, but it seems true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It’s time for social media to grow up

It was no surprise to read the warnings about the possible impact of social media on young children’s mental health from the children’s commissioner last week. Researchers heard from eight- to 12-year-olds who worried about losing friends if they didn’t respond quickly enough to “streak” messages on Snapchat, which would end the “streak”. Many children said they felt ugly compared with the people they followed on Instagram.

The problem is what to do about it. Like most social media, WhatsApp has a minimum age of 13. Yet my 10-year-old daughter wants it, and her friends and many other children her age already use it. I could ban her from social media. But in the real world who would do that? Holding out until Christmas to buy her a phone like “everyone else” in year 6 was hard enough.

The 2017 Ofcom report found that 28% of 10-year-olds and three-quarters of 12- to 15-year-olds have a social media profile. The children’s commissioner concluded last week that while parents play a role, so do the social media companies. After all, they made the apps as addictive as possible without any regard to the possible impact on children.

Secondary school pupils 'ill-equipped to cope' with stress of social media Read more

In recent months we have heard Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, admit he was worried about the impact of technology designed to create addicts. Even Justin Rosenstein, the engineer who created the Facebook “like”, is so worried about his own desire to constantly check his status updates that he got his assistant to set up parental controls on his phone.

Social media groups can do something: one click doesn’t have to lead to constant YouTube videos, for example, while there should be the equivalent of a social media out-of-office.

The government has been asked to make both media and digital literacy compulsory in schools so pupils will learn about not just stranger danger online but also what fake news is and how to resist the siren call of the like button. The children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, wants to see the introduction of compulsory digital literacy and online resilience lessons for pupils in year 6 and 7, and the government should listen.

The technology industry would argue that education and self-regulation is the answer, and there is some truth to that. The criticism Logan Paul received from his own fanbase, as well as elsewhere, for posting a video showing the body of an apparent suicide victim led the millionaire YouTuber to apologise. Yet change has to happen, and fast.

At eight years old, WhatsApp is younger than my daughter. Its owner, Facebook, is a teenage parent at 14. Social media has been one of the most exhilarating, transformative tools invented, but, in dealing with the consequences of its use, all of us need to grow up a bit faster. As kids are having to.