Watch & Listen
Documentaries, podcasts, and investigative journalism worth your time.
How to read this page. Tap any underlined word to see the precise term and a short definition. Expand the "Deeper" box for a note on watching critically. The main list works on its own.
Watch
The Social Dilemma (Netflix, 2020)
Tech insiders explaining their own products. Over 100 million viewers. Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, and other former platform employees explaining the design choices and their consequences. Slightly dramatised in places, but accurate in its core argument. One of the most effective single pieces of awareness-raising about platform design in the public domain.
Adolescence (Netflix, 2025)
A dramatised account of a teenage boy's radicalisation through online manosphere content. Not a documentary — fictional, with composite characters — but accurate in its portrayal of the pipeline. Used as a discussion starter in schools across Europe. Watching it with a young person and discussing what you each noticed is one of the most effective conversations available.
The Great Hack (Netflix, 2019)
The Cambridge Analytica story, told partly through the perspective of a professor who sued for his Facebook data. The most accessible account of what behavioural profiling for political targeting looks like in practice.
Adam Curtis documentaries (BBC iPlayer)
The tonal reference for this entire site. HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021) are both relevant. Not light watching — but the model for how to explain systems without being preachy.
Listen
Your Undivided Attention (Center for Humane Technology)
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin interviewing researchers, regulators, and former tech insiders. The most substantive regular podcast on the attention machine and its implications.
Rabbit Hole (New York Times)
Kevin Roose's podcast on how the internet shapes beliefs and behaviour, following the recommendation pipeline case by case. The companion to his New York Times investigation "The Making of a YouTube Radical."
Radicalisation pipeline
The gradual drift from mainstream to extreme content, one small recommended step at a time — the "rabbit hole." No single step feels like a leap, but the cumulative direction is consistent, because the engine has learned that more extreme content holds attention.
Sources
- Roose, K. (2019), "The Making of a YouTube Radical", New York Times.
Darknet Diaries
True stories from the dark side of the internet. More technical than most entries on this list, but some episodes are directly relevant to how surveillance, manipulation, and information operations work in practice.
Read
The Facebook Papers (Wall Street Journal, 2021)
Frances Haugen's disclosures — the original reporting by the WSJ based on internal Facebook documents. The primary source for much of what this site documents about Facebook's internal knowledge of harm. Freely available online.
"The Making of a YouTube Radical" (Kevin Roose, New York Times, 2019)
The landmark piece documenting the recommendation pipeline in detail. One person's YouTube history, followed over eighteen months, from mainstream content to far-right extremism through the platform's own recommendations.
Deeper — watching critically, especially the dramatised ones
Two of the most-watched titles here are not documentaries in the strict sense. The Social Dilemma dramatises its argument with fictional scenes alongside the interviews, and has been criticised for overstating individual-level mind-control while underplaying the structural and commercial framing this site emphasises. Adolescence is openly fiction — composite characters, a constructed story — accurate about the pipeline it portrays but not evidence in itself.
That does not make them not worth watching; it makes them worth watching the way you would read a persuasive essay. The documentaries are a way in; the sourced argument is on the rest of this site. Where a film makes a striking claim, the useful next step is to check it against the primary sources in the Sources blocks throughout these pages.