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. Chosen by 38 million households in its first four weeks, by Netflix's own count. 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 widely seen pieces of awareness-raising about platform design there is.
Adolescence (Netflix, 2025)
A dramatised account of a teenage boy's radicalisation through online content from the manosphere — a worldview that attributes male difficulties primarily to women and feminism. Not a documentary — fictional, with composite characters — but accurate about the mechanics it portrays. Netflix made it free to UK secondary schools through Into Film+ in March 2025, with discussion guides. Watching it with a young person and discussing what you each noticed is a good way to start that conversation.
The Great Hack (Netflix, 2019)
The Cambridge Analytica story, told partly through the perspective of David Carroll, a professor who went to court to make Cambridge Analytica hand over the data it held on him. 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 route from mainstream content toward extreme content — the "rabbit hole." What is well established is narrower than the name suggests: the platform lowers the cost of finding extreme content and of finding each other, and it serves that material preferentially to people already leaning that way. Whether the recommendation engine drives the escalation on its own is contested among researchers — the honest version is on the radicalisation page.
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 Files (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 following one person's route through the recommendation pipeline in detail — a single case, vivid rather than conclusive; whether the engine drives such escalation on its own is contested among researchers. One young man's YouTube history, more than 12,000 videos from 2015 onwards, from a self-help video recommended to him in late 2014 into far-right politics over the following years — which he swore off nearly five years after discovering it.
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 mechanics 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.
Sources
- Netflix (20 October 2020), Q3 2020 letter to shareholders — The Social Dilemma "had 38m in its first 28 days" (counted as member households that chose it).
- Netflix (31 March 2025), "Netflix Makes 'Adolescence' Available to All Secondary Schools Across the UK" — through Into Film+, free for state secondary schools in England and, with Netflix's funding, in the other UK nations; guides and resources from the healthy relationships charity Tender.
- Roose, K. (2019), "The Making of a YouTube Radical", New York Times.
- The Facebook Files (2021), Wall Street Journal — the Haugen disclosures.
- High Court of Justice, Business and Property Courts (17 April 2019), Green v Group Ltd & Ors [2019] EWHC 954 (Ch) — "On 16 March 2018 Prof. Carroll issued proceedings … [seeking] an order that 'the Defendant' comply in full with Prof. Carroll's SAR"; Information Commissioner's Office (9 January 2019), SCL Elections prosecuted for failing to comply with enforcement notice (archived copy; the ICO has removed the page) — fined £15,000 for ignoring the order to answer Carroll's subject access request.
- Netflix, The Great Hack (2019) — the film's own page.
- BBC, Adam Curtis: HyperNormalisation (released 16 October 2016) and Can't Get You Out of My Head (six parts, 11 February 2021) — the BBC's programme pages.
- Pankova, E. (8 October 2020), The Social Dilemma and the Rise of the Clickbait Documentary, The New Republic — the dramatised "algorithm" scenes suggest "all of us are being controlled in the same way", while "the fact that a business model underlies the world of social media in the first place remains unquestioned".
- Center for Humane Technology, Your Undivided Attention (podcast).
- Rhysider, J., Darknet Diaries (podcast).