People sign petitions and donate to charity and post it to their news feeds, in what is known as "virtue signalling".

But the crowds who have taken to Twitter to decry the Conservative U-turn are themselves virtue signalling.

I am fascinated by "virtue signalling": the very modern phenomenon of using people, places and concepts as shorthand for one's saintliness.

Parents on low incomes rely on free school meals during term time because they cannot afford to feed their children three times a day Getty Images I think it was the journalist Libby Purves who coined the term "virtue signalling", and ever since I came across it I've noticed examples everywhere.

A more interesting line of inquiry than the ASI's hypothesis about the virtue signalling of arts degrees would be to examine when such screening tips over from being a useful rule of thumb, or heuristic, to being economically harmful.

Perhaps the ASI would dismiss this as mere virtue signalling by the companies that have signed up to these new methods.

She looks blank when someone suggests jokingly that hers is a sort of "It" bag, really, and doesn't get the fuss about "virtue signalling": surely it's good to show you care?

The aim seemed to be to win over the public with "virtue signalling", that 2015 neologism for cheap public moralising, by aligning Airbnb with progressive politics - something it has previously done with an Ellis Island, immigration-themed advertising campaign about "welcoming people".

Virtue signalling is cheap - as long as you pay lip service to diversity and equality the loudest political activists will ignore how you actually behave and focus their anger on small Christian bakeries.

It is all machismo, virtue signalling, to cover the raw fact that neither the West nor the Arab world has any intention of doing the one thing that might defeat IS, which is to wage real war on it so as to dispossess it of territory.