The Gatekeepers
Jamie Bartlett traces the story of how and why social media companies have become the new information gatekeepers, and what the decisions they make mean for all of us. It's 20 years since Facebook launched and the social media we know today - but it all started with a crazy idea to realise a hippie dream of building a "global consciousness". The plan was to build a connected world, where everyone could access everyone and everything all the time; to overthrow the old gatekeepers and set information free. But social media didn't turn out that way. Instead of setting information free - a new digital elite conquered the world and turned themselves into the most powerful people on the planet. Now, they get to decide what billions of us see every day. They can amplify you. They can delete you. Their platforms can be used to coordinate social movements and insurrections. A content moderator thousands of miles away can change your life. What does this mean for democracy - and our shared reality? It starts in the summer of love, with a home-made book that taught the counter-culture how to build a new civilisation - and accidentally led to the creation of the first social media platform. But a momentous decision in the mid-2000s would turn social media into giant advertising companies - with dramatic ramifications for everyone. To understand how we arrived here, Jamie tracks down the author of a 1996 law which laid the groundwork for web 2.0; interviews the Twitter employees responsible for banning Donald Trump who explain the reality of 'content moderation'; and speaks to Facebook's most infamous whistle-blower in a dusty room in Oxford. He goes in search of people whose lives have been transformed by the decisions taken by these new gatekeepers: a father whose daughter's death was caused by social media, a Nobel prize winning journalist from the Philippines who decided to stand up to a dictator and the son of an Ethiopian professor determined to avenge his father's murder. Far from being over, Jamie discovers that the battle over who controls the world's information has only just begun.
Episodes
It all started with a crazy idea to realise a hippie dream of building a “global consciousness”. The plan was to build a connected world, where everyone could access everyone and everything all the time; to overthrow the old gatekeepers and set information free.
But social media didn’t turn out that way. Instead of setting information free – a new digital elite conquered the world and turned themselves into the most powerful people ...
For years something strange has been happening online, but most of us have no idea what’s really going on.
Ethnic conflict in Myanmar. A chemistry professor is killed in Ethiopia. A teenager dies in her bedroom in London. A mob storms the Capitol in Washington DC.
And that’s the moment that catches Jamie Bartlett’s eye. A few days after the riot, on January 9th 2021, the outgoing leader of the United States is suspended on social me...
From the rubble of the dot com crash, an ambitious young Harvard student with a passion for hacking and love of Roman emperors, sets up an exciting new website.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is an instant hit on college campuses.
Soon it attracts the attention of Silicon Valley’s most successful - but controversial - venture capitalist, Peter Thiel.
The company starts to scale up. But there’s one problem - how is it going to make mone...
The tech pioneers were right: all this connectivity and sharing is creating a new age of freedom and democracy. A global consciousness.
Arab Spring, Barack Obama – both fuelled by social media - make the possibilities feel limitless.
But, just as the dream to connect everyone is being realised - at the height of technological optimism - everything starts to fall apart.
Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Designer: Eloise Whitmore Mix: Gav...
2016 is a big election year. But something is going very wrong online. Journalists in America and the Philippines start to notice something strange going on online.
In Manila, Maria Ressa - the editor of online news site, Rappler - discovers a sock puppet network of social media accounts, all pushing for the election of a strong leader. Someone like Rodrigo Duterte. Maria is suspicious. She makes an urgent call to Facebook.
In Vele...
One of the strange things about our new media universe, is how innocuous decisions taken in Silicon Valley - turning a dial, or adding a few lines of code to increase engagement - can change your life.
In 2016, Instagram introduced a new way of looking at content: the non-chronological feed.
Now, instead of seeing what your friends were posting in the order they were posting it, an algorithm brought you stuff based on search histor...
In 2018, the CEOs of our most popular social media companies are standing at a crossroad.
After political outcry over Russian interference in the 2016 election and fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, tech leaders have a decision to make.
They need to come up with ways of making their platforms safer.
One route is a radical overhaul of the entire business model. The other is the biggest digital clean-up operation ever atte...
Jamie Bartlett travels to Minnesota to meet Abrham Meareg Amare.
The young academic is seeking asylum in the States following the murder of his father in Ethiopia in 2021.
In December 2022, Abrham became the lead complainant in a $2 billion lawsuit against Meta. Abrham believes that company is partly responsible for the death of his dad - a renowned chemistry professor - who was slandered and doxxed on Facebook, before being shot o...
On 30th September 2022 a coroner in London finds that Molly Russell "...died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content."
The finding is a global first. Social media is ruled to have contributed to the death of a child.
In San Francisco, around the same time, a strange story is unfolding inside Twitter HQ.
Ever since Donald Trump's account was suspended on Twitter, tensions ...
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