With the approach of Good Friday and Easter, we could do worse than call to mind the famous question posed by Pontius Pilate to Jesus at his trial: 'What is truth?'

The apparently rather desperate enquiry is, like so much in the Gospels, actually rich and multi-layered in meaning. But in an age of mass manipulation and social media, its interpretation takes on a fresh and further urgency.

For we are all involved in the info wars, whether as consumers of news or actors in it, and there are very few civilians; every time we retweet or share we become, instead, combatants.

Perhaps it was in this context that, only in January this year, Pope Francis most recently spoke publicly about the evil of 'fake news', the term so beloved of Donald Trump.

'The strategy of this skilled "Father of Lies" is precisely mimicry, that sly and dangerous form of seduction that worms its way into the heart with false and alluring arguments,' he said in words that seem apt today, as the Russian president Vladimir Putin emerges triumphant with another all-too-predictable landslide victory.

This is a victory that comes despite – or perhaps in part thanks to – the recent use of a nerve agent on British soil in Salisbury against Sergei Skripal, 66, a former Russian military official convicted of spying for the UK, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, who was visiting from Russia.

And yet it is not only the Russian people who are duped. Trump, along with many Americans, has clearly and for whatever reasons allowed himself to be, having sacked the former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after the latter pointed the finger at Putin over the extraordinary Salisbury attack.

And meanwhile, in Britain, the official leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn continues to offer only qualified condemnation of Putin, an undoubted tyrant, doubtless duping in the process some, at least, of his army of young supporters who lack the context of the Cold War.

The point of all this is that we are supposed now to live in a post-modern age of newly ushered in transparency, open democracy, freedom of information and social media revolution.

But instead we do indeed live in a stuck-in-the-past, Animal Farm-esque era of fake news, apparently perpetrated, not just by Trump himself, Putin and other major world leaders but also by one of the most important 'revolutionary' social media platforms: Facebook.

There are calls today for an investigation after it emerged in the Observer that Facebook and the analytics company that worked with Trump's election team, Cambridge Analytica, allegedly breached the data of tens of millions of people to build a system that may have influenced voters in the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Who, then, can we look to in this age of international dishonesty on a massive scale? Some Christians, especially given the pope's remarks about fake news, may expect the Vatican always to shine a light of truth on and to the world.

But extraordinarily, it also emerged last week that the Holy See is not beyond blatant media manipulation, too, with a letter from the retired Pope Benedict XVI reportedly praising his successor Pope Francis being partially doctored, blurred, redacted to hide an embarrassing paragraph in which he makes it clear that he neither wished to nor had the time to read a series of works on the current pope's theology.

The bizarre move is worthy of the most oily of media spin doctors – and a reminder that 'fake news' is, alas, everywhere today.

It is an irony that instead, a collection of accounts from 2,000 years ago, of what remains the most momentous story the world has ever seen, whose four New Testament Gospel versions vary very slightly in a way that only adds to their authenticity, continues rightly to convince millions of people around the world.

This Easter, as fake news swirls around us, now may be a good time to reflect on Ephesians 6:11 and the instruction by Paul to 'Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil'.

In today's world, this armour should include refusing to believe anything is true without checking it, wherever possible, at its original source; not simply reading and listening to the echo chamber of people who agree with you; and, finally and less cynically, thinking the best of people for as long as you can.

Then, we can ask afresh, in a news and political context as well as a spiritual one: What is truth?