This is exactly what the government would have the population do when it comes to the increasingly credible accusations of collusion between itself and the shady purveyors and manipulators of big data.

The world over, and Malta is no exception, is losing its faith in the traditional media in today’s world pick-and-choose post-truth politics, but an EU-wide survey published this week shows that the Maltese population trusts political parties far more than their European peers, and that they trust the printed media far less than other Europeans.

It appears that 36 per cent of the population in Malta places its trust in political parties compared to 32 per cent that trusts the printed media. This, all things considered, is not really all that much of a shocker, but those figures actually begin to shock when one compares them with EU-wide figures, which paint quite a different picture when it comes to the trust barometer.

On a pan European level, meanwhile, only 18 per cent of people trust political parties while a massive 47 per cent trust the printed media. Sixty-three per cent of Maltese, meanwhile, said they trusted their government, compared with 35 per cent across the EU.

There is an enormous disparity rearing its ugly head here, and it is one that warrants further investigation. And the question is: what could it be that induces the Maltese population to trust their political parties more than the written, independent media that is supposedly looking out for them?

Are the Maltese really that gullible? Is the Maltese government so much more trustworthy than those of other European States are? Or is there something else at play here?

Let us start with the finding that twice as many Maltese go to the internet as their primary source of information for all things political – 40 per cent of Maltese do so compared with 21 per cent of its European peers. Maltese, the EU-wide survey found, use websites and social media networks to a much greater extent than other Europeans for news.

This has been a known fact since practically the advent of Facebook and other social media, with which we as a nation are almost obsessed, but the question is whether and how that has been leveraged for electoral success.

The facts suggest that Maltese citizens and their representatives should really be taking an interest in how its citizens’ data has been harvested by Cambridge Analytica’s mother company, SCL Elections. Although ‘only’ 6,011 Maltese citizens had their data harvested by the controversial firm, Malta’s per capita proportion makes it the most ‘harvested’ country in the European Union after the United Kingdom.

The Maltese government has denied any sort of involvement with the firm after this week’s accusations from a British parliamentary committee, which found that the Maltese Labour Party was in cahoots with the companies since before entering office in 2013. The government has flatly denied the allegation and has challenged the committee to cough up the proof.

Whatever the case, proof or no proof, it still stands to be determined why the company had taken such an interest in tiny Malta, so much so that close to one in 70 Maltese Facebook users had their data mined and harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

Such campaigns are not conducted on a whim, there is always rhyme and reason behind them. And while the details of 6,000-odd people may not seem like a mountain of data, it is significant for a country of this size, as it is far more than enough of a sample size to carry out psychological electioneering profiling, and who knows what else.

This in itself is utterly shocking and warrants a domestic investigation, at the very least, or possibly even a public inquiry given the approaching elections.

And speaking of those May elections, in which we will elect our MEPs and all our local councils in less than 100 days, even the Council of Europe is sounding the alarm bells, having issued a warning about the ‘risk of algorithmic processes being used to manipulate social and political behaviour’.

The Council of Europe (CoE) has actually called on its 47 member states to tackle the risk that individuals may not be able to form their opinions and take decisions independently of automated systems, and that they may even be subjected to manipulation due to the use of advanced digital technologies, in particular micro-targeting techniques.

Machine learning tools have the growing capacity not only to predict choices but also to influence emotions and thoughts, sometimes subliminally. In a Declaration last week, the CoE warned about the risks to democratic societies resulting from the possibility to employ such tools to manipulate and control not only economic choices, but also social and political behaviours.

The government, of course, would prefer it if such matters were not looked into too closely and would, of course, prefer it if everyone would just ignore this digital danger. This is most certainly a case of ‘move along, nothing to see here’. There is an awful lot to see, the problem is that it is not so visible to the naked eye.

And while people are, for one reason or another, losing their faith in the traditional printed media, we have not lost faith in the people. And rest assured that we will continue to bring to the people the news and information they need to have whether they like it, or whether they believe it, or not.