Fake news, conspiracy theories, social media rumours – meet Lyric Jain, the man sifting fact from fiction

In a mansion in the Staffordshire Potteries once owned by a scourge of the Napoleonic navy lives a scourge of fake news. On Valentine’s Day, 1797, Admiral John Jervis defeated a fleet of French warships outnumbering him two to one. Nearly 225 years on, Lyric Jain has just returned to his family home – once Jervis’s family home – fresh from his own battles against impossible odds: firing truths across an ocean of lies.

He has spent the best part of the week in Poland fighting Russian disinformation. “There are clearly so many battlefronts in the world of disinformation,” he says. “Eastern Europe is certainly one of them.”

Twenty-five years old and an impressive 6ft 4in, Jain was whimsically named Lyric by his parents, an

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