The Guardian – The founder of the online classifieds site is a survivor from the era of internet optimism. He has given significant sums to protect the future of news – and rejects the idea his website helped cause journalism’s financial crisis

…Newmark, who has previously observed “a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy”, prefers not to use the term “fake news” – perhaps it has been tainted for ever by Donald Trump. He reasons: “Some people have said fake news is news that I don’t like, so I will talk about misinformation or disinformation and that is often either false news or false witness, either weaponised information or just carelessness…There is an entire ecosystem at work, he continues, that can enable a falsehood from the obscure reaches of the web to jump on to millions of TV screens with dizzying speed. “It’s a small amount of disinformation originating in some of the social media platforms used by foreign adversaries and their domestic allies. They get amplified: there’s multiple levels including conspiracy sites, then news sites which don’t care about fact-checking. And then once that becomes news, sometimes that emerges into conventional or mainstream media.”…”