Have you ever been trapped in a group chat nightmare, either grabbing the popcorn or wondering how to leave without causing a scene? Who’s the admin in your family group, and do they wield that power responsibly? Do you ever wonder if it’s appr

8. I Sung of Chaos

Mar 25th, 2024 33m 38s

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 con

7. Rest of World

Mar 18th, 2024 32m 25s

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 law

6. Arbiters of Truth

Mar 11th, 2024 31m 3s

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 ma

5. The Vortex

Mar 4th, 2024 30m 22s

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

4. Flood the Zone

Feb 26th, 2024 31m 26s

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

3. Are You Not Engaged?

Feb 19th, 2024 28m 57s

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 a

2. Blitzscaling

Feb 12th, 2024 29m 3s

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

1. We Are as Gods

Feb 5th, 2024 29m 23s

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 Capit

Introducing The Gatekeepers

Jan 29th, 2024 3m 7s

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