Sweden’s deputy prime minister is trolling Donald Trump through Twitter to make a point about women’s rights. With young people notoriously politically disengaged, politicians are using comedic techniques to enable serious issues to gain a wider audience.

A common technique used by trolls is to bombard a message board with irrelevant posts to derail the dialogue. And the Chinese government has been using an eerily similar tack – putting out thousands of unrelated messages on social media to distract citizens from unsavoury news stories.

If Faisal Islam, Ralph Keyes and theNew York Timesare to be believed, the Trump candidacy and the vote for Brexit show we've entered a post-truth era – a world where emotion and populism win out over facts and experts. But is it true? And do emotional appeals really trump facts and figures?

In the US, there’s a huge gap between the number of eligible voters and those that actually make themselves heard on election day; around 93 million Americans didn’t cast their ballot in 2012. How has Hillary Clinton’s campaign harnessed digital platforms to engage people and get out the vote?