Inside the Rage Machine (2026)

[bunniefuu]

- I know the whole House will be very

concerned at the extremely serious

incident that has taken place in

Southport.

- A 17-year-old male from Banks, in

Lancashire,

who is originally from Cardiff,

has been arrested on suspicion of

m*rder.

- As soon as I saw those tweets,

spreading misinformation about the

identity of the attacker,

I knew exactly what was going to happen.

- The violence started after false

rumours about the suspect...

- Social media platforms are a way

that people express

their shock and anger.

- An undocumented migrant decided to

go into

a Taylor Swift dance class...

- When toxic opinions go viral, it can

have real-world harm.

But Southport was just the latest in a

long chain of events.

We have seen social media have so much

influence,

over and over again.

And that is down to the algorithm.

An unstoppable flow of content.

And those of us who understand how

this works

need to stop that happening.

- Our world is being actively remade.

Falsehood spreads faster than fact,

dividing communities and distorting

reality.

And as trust collapses, so does our

shared sense of truth.

The defining challenge of the 21st

century is not simply

who wields the most powerful

technologies,

but who guides them with the greatest

wisdom.

- You've created these platforms,

and now they are being misused.

- It's for profits, for money.

- Influence and power.

- People don't understand the beast

that they're feeding.

- It becomes our duty to speak out.

- Do you want me to look at the

camera, by the way?

- Yeah.

- Ready? Shall I clap?

Ever since I can remember, I've loved

social media.

I grew up on Facebook.

It was an important part of connecting

with my friends.

The worst thing that would happen is

you'd find out you hadn't been

invited to a party or a sleepover.

It doesn't feel like that now.

It feels quite different.

My Feed is full of this toxic, angry

stuff,

people screaming in my face,

and I can't not look because it's my

job.

As the BBC's social media

investigations correspondent,

part of what I do is try to understand

why there's so much

of this stuff on these platforms.

But it's incredibly hard to get

straight answers from the companies.

And the few people who do come forward

do so at great risk.

- If you come out as a whistle-blower,

and you are named,

you have a scarlet letter on your

head.

So, my goal is to not get sued.

By coming public, I know that my

career prospects in big tech

are probably next to zero now.

- How does it feel showing me this?

- Sort of terrifying.

Sort of terrifying.

- Oh, wow, you've got so much.

This must have taken you ages to

document.

- Yeah, yeah.

A little bit.

I spent four years at Meta,

so I've seen the other side of the

curtain

and I know some of the problems more

than I wish I did.

I have these kind of higher-level

research documents showing, like,

all sorts of harms to users on these

platforms.

If these companies are not going to

protect people,

it becomes my duty, and people like me

-

as people that actually understand how

these systems work -

to speak out.

So, a lot of the screenshots that I

have here

are how we ranked content.

The algorithm is built to prioritise

the stuff that gets

the most engagement, and the political

content that gets

the most engagement is typically

misinformation.

It's typically very toxic.

So, people yelling and being really

mean to each other.

- How worried should we be about the

algorithm, in terms of the role

they play in pushing this kind of

stuff?

- People don't want to see that

content.

But people don't know that they're

choosing to push this content

to you, even though you say you don't

want it.

And the consequences are really,

really bad.

Meta's products are used by north of 3

billion people.

And the more time they can keep you on

there,

the more ads they sell and the more

money they make.

But it's very important that they get

this stuff right,

because when they don't, really bad

things happen.

- In 2018, Facebook took Sri Lanka by

storm.

This whole road is full of smartphone

shops on either side,

and it's just shop after shop after

shop.

And people come here from all over the

city, actually,

to get a good deal.

Facebook had a programme where, with

every phone that was sold,

you got Facebook for free - it didn't

use up your data.

So, it kind of became the default

platform.

You felt a real sense of community,

a sense of...belonging.

Scratch beneath that veneer, and

Facebook became the predominant way

that the worst elements in society

used it to inflame hate.

Sri Lanka is marked by a majority

Sinhala Buddhist population.

We've had Muslims for centuries.

But there is a small group of Buddhist

monks...

..who used Facebook to directly target

the Muslim community

in Sri Lanka.

I was really tuned in to how Facebook

was being weaponised.

And there was this video that I saw of

this Muslim man.

The people recording the footage are

asking him

whether he put infertility pills into

the food that they consumed.

And he's confused.

He doesn't clearly understand Sinhala.

In those parts of the country, Tamil

is spoken, not Sinhala.

But the voices take it as - this was

the evidence, right?

I mean, here was a man who was

admitting to the fact

that the Muslim community was making

Sinhala Buddhist women infertile.

So, by 48 hours, this was shared in

the thousands.

It was like a...

..a frothing hate.

- TRANSLATION:

- Buddhist mobs set fire to homes and

businesses,

k*lling young Muslims.

- It was quite simply one of the worst

anti-Muslim violence

that Sri Lanka had ever seen.

Facebook was the wind to the seeds of

racism.

What was on the platform resulted in

people believing it

and taking action as a consequence.

And I didn't have any way to reach

out.

There was no-one to reach out to.

We were utterly helpless.

- I find it bonkers, when you look at

the stuff that Matt shared

from inside Facebook.

I think that this document is one of

the most revealing ones,

as it's an internal study led by a

data scientist.

It essentially talks about how

Facebook rewards outrage

and that, if you get more negative

comments,

you're going to get more clicks.

And there's this bit where they talk

about the incentives

that the company are creating,

essentially saying

"outrage gets attention".

And then laying out and saying, "The

current set of financial incentives

"our algorithms create does not appear

to be aligned

"with our mission."

Eg, their mission is to do good in the

world,

and yet those recommendation systems,

those algorithms,

are pushing the kind of content that

feeds off negative reaction.

And, therefore, you can see how it's

impacting users.

And they essentially lay it out in

black and white.

It's not like...

It's not like it's much of a secret,

really. We kind of all know it.

But the thing is, THEY know it too.

And Sri Lanka was not a one-off thing.

- Almost as far as the eye could see,

a tide of humanity.

They're carrying with them whatever

they could salvage

from their villages, their homes that

they say they were

burnt out of by the Myanmar military.

Look at that little baby there in a

basket.

- Take, for example, what happened in

Myanmar.

Facebook was actively pushing hate.

And it's not just these places.

It was part of a pattern that was

happening all over the world.

People were acting on the basis of

what they were seeing on Facebook.

There wasn't any other information

they were responding to.

And I think it's for that reason that

Facebook almost had to

come out and apologise. Because there

was no way of saying,

"Well, hang on, this wasn't to do with

us."

It was entirely connected to Facebook.

- We've got to keep moving, folks.

Watch your steps.

- Recently, UN investigators blamed

Facebook for playing a role in

inciting possible genocide in Myanmar.

- What's happening in Myanmar is a

terrible tragedy,

and we need to do more...

- We all agree with that.

- I was recruited to Meta because the

company got a lot of bad PR.

I mean, there was Cambridge Analytica.

There was Russia's involvement in the

2016 election.

And from places like Myanmar or Sri

Lanka,

they just weren't investing enough,

and a lot of the hate speech there was

just missed.

It wasn't being caught.

- We didn't take a broad enough view

of our responsibility,

and that was a big mistake.

And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.

- So, Mark spent in the billions

to hire a bunch of experts

and create specialised integrity

teams.

Our job description was reducing harms

to users, at a global scale.

I said, "Oh, that's my dream.

"That is my life's work."

- I had the opportunity to join

Facebook,

to actually see it for myself,

from the inside.

And so, I think it was really

once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There were so many dedicated people

that wanted to do the right thing.

- You know, I believe deeply in

transparency.

And I think one of the solutions out

there is to share more data

with the outside world.

And so, I created CrowdTangle.

An online dashboard you could log

into.

What we did was made it really easy to

see what stories

and what content was true or false on

Facebook that day.

If it weren't for that CrowdTangle

dashboard,

you couldn't get any of that.

Mark was so invested in it, and bought

it

to make sure Facebook has a positive

role on the world.

- What is the new mission of Facebook?

- So, our new mission is to bring the

world closer together.

- When Mark announced a major

algorithm change,

called meaningful social interactions,

my sense, actually,

was that there was a real, genuine

interest in trying to build

a better algorithm during those years.

There was a real overhaul to the

fundamental way

that content was ranked inside the

Feed.

Ranking friends and family over

something called civic content,

news and political content.

They said, "Yeah, it turns out people

click on the politics,

"but, actually, they end up like

feeling worse after a while,

"and so we're going to reduce the

amount of politics in the Feed."

- My job entailed running large-scale

experiments on

sometimes as many as hundreds of

millions of people,

where we would change how content was

ranked in Feed.

And these people often had no idea

that they were in experiments.

You just might have a different feel

to your Feed one day.

So, you log in, and much of the civic

content from your Feed

might be missing, or the protections

against harmful content

might be turned off.

And what I found was that, you remove

the reliable,

trustworthy news sources

and you end up with my uncle,

who likes to post conspiracy theories.

This change that was meant to bring

people closer together

and help them connect actually had the

opposite effect,

where it was promoting content that

was dividing people

and sowing more division

and creating more conflict between

people.

So, while it sounded great, we've more

than doubled

views on misinformation by demoting

civic content.

Is that the goal? No, it's not the

goal.

It's the opposite of the goal.

So, we warned against this in a

document

that we delivered to the team,

and that was read to Zuck in advance

of launching

these broad-scale experiments, and...

..that was all ignored.

We warned, very sternly, this is not

going to go well.

And then, it didn't go well.

- Major cities across the country are

looking more like ghost towns.

Shops locked up, normally bustling

streets now oddly quiet.

- At first, it seemed like just

another event.

And then suddenly we had this massive

surge, in terms of volume.

People were spending a large amount of

time on online platforms,

where all the information was

brand-new,

and we weren't able to clearly

identify exactly what the truth was.

- New cases and deaths associated with

the coronavirus

continue to climb right around the

world.

- What the pandemic created was this

perfect storm,

because you've got people stuck at

home, spending more time online.

And the algorithms, the recommendation

systems,

they were becoming ever more

influential.

- They'll k*ll millions with their

vaccines.

There is no vaccine currently on the

schedule

for any RNA virus that works.

- I found it very frustrating.

A lot of my time at Meta was spent

focused on how to quickly identify

conspiracy theories, conflicting

information.

- Right now, you are being lied to!

- It was always difficult to identify

which of those would escalate

to rioting or violence.

And that's a hard thing to deal with.

- None of you have reported on the

truth since day one.

You're complicit in crimes against

humanity.

- Just knowing that there's the

possibility that something bad

might have happened and maybe there

might have been

an opportunity to prevent it...

..that's a really jarring thing for

me.

The nightmare that kind of sits in the

back of my brain.

It's definitely a space which is

stressful for me.

- Misinformation running rampant...

- You are being lied to!

- They'll k*ll millions...

- CHANTING

PRODUCER:

- What did it feel like when you were

at the riots that night?

- During the lockdown, there was no

light in the city.

Everything was closed.

And as a DJ artist, it was

devastating.

I felt really lonely.

Sometimes, I even wanted to cry.

Got a little bit more...more

frustrated.

We wanted our freedom back and go back

to normal.

So, when I saw a post of Facebook

group

that was anti-Dutch government,

it intrigued me.

They do for the same cause like I did.

It was my first time in the group.

It felt like I found a new family.

We stayed in contact every day,

sometimes even at night.

The whole pandemic, it divided people

into so many different groups.

But then, you always have a few people

who have

a lot of influence on other people.

They have power, mental power.

It was almost a daily routine for them

to spread hate and to be negative.

And the tension was growing.

I could feel that something was

happening.

Conversations got angrier, more out of

control.

And people really wanted to do

something about it.

So, to me, fighting for our freedom

was more important than even my own

life.

- CHANTING

- Leading up to the protest, I think

they were all hyped up,

they were full of adrenaline,

and people already started to incite

each other.

In a certain moment, I was really

scared,

because the way some people looked,

with the hate and aggression,

like they were ready to even k*ll

another man.

- EXCLAIMATION ON VIDEO

- I saw very young boys, maybe age 13

or 14,

throwing rocks at police cars.

The whole city changed,

and it's like people just turned into

animals.

- It was a complete w*r zone in 20

minutes.

They make each other crazy, using

social media -

I'm sure about that.

That day, it was the worst day of my

life.

This is the place where I used to have

my restaurant.

And they burned it with the fireworks.

There was sh**ting, as well.

- BLASTS ECHO

It must have been so scary.

I mean, even when you left, it must

have been scary.

- Yes, of course!

I cried, and I thought, tomorrow

there's nothing left to work.

- The pandemic was such a stark

example that Facebook had

got so much bigger than Mark

Zuckerberg.

He'd sort of lost control.

Social media was really dividing

people,

particularly in Facebook groups.

People were suddenly talking about

hanging doctors and nurses,

and attacking people.

- They're very passionate...

So, I've just been struck in the back

of...

..back of the head by a can.

That really hurt.

- Wanting retribution, wanting

justice, in cities across Europe.

The violence, connected to what was

happening on social media,

that started in places like Sri Lanka,

was coming closer and closer to home.

- Are you willing to acknowledge that

Facebook IS contributing

to society's woes, polarisation and

all the rest?

It's pouring gasoline on the burning

fire in front of us?

- Well, look, obviously, for a

platform which has, what,

a third of the world's population on

it, of course you see, you know,

you see the good, the bad and the ugly

of humanity

show up on our platform as well.

Our job is to mitigate the bad, reduce

it, and amplify the good.

- These user insight documents from

inside Facebook come from

the period when the company was using

this new argument.

We're not responsible for everything.

We are "a mirror" reflecting back

society.

These documents basically talk about

the way that users

are having their psychological

processes activated

by certain types of content.

In particular, they say this happens

when users view sensitive content,

which includes content that has an

elevated risk of causing harm

to people and inciting violence.

So, you basically are admitting that

the way that you are building

the platforms, and the way that you

are using the algorithms,

the recommendation systems,

ultimately result in these harms.

And that can have a real-world

consequence for us.

- Generally felt like leadership

wasn't sure what the answer was.

But it began to calcify into a sort of

defensiveness.

"We're not responsible for all of

polarisation in society."

Nobody's saying you're responsible for

ALL polarisation.

We're just saying you contribute to

it,

and probably in ways where, like, you

don't have to.

And if you just made a few changes,

you might not contribute to it as

much.

And, yeah, I think that was...that was

dispiriting,

because it felt like there was a

window in which it was, like,

genuinely introspective.

- If you haven't heard of the TikTok

app, you will soon.

- It is among the fastest social

networking app

to be able to go from zero to over 200

million in registered users,

60 million daily actives around the

world, in a span of three years.

So, that growth is incredible.

- I was very lucky I joined TikTok.

My job was to improve the algorithm,

so you're able to watch 50 videos in a

row,

maybe in five or ten minutes.

The TikTok algorithm is able to

collect a lot more

information from you.

- Is anyone else, like, a little

weirded out about how specific

TikTok's algorithm gets for the For

You page?

- Since Facebook became Meta - what,

in mid-October -

it's really struggled to find its

footing

or gain some traction here.

User growth is stalled or shrinking.

- Meta was down, because TikTok is

literally eating its lunch, right?

Like, there is no doubt in my mind,

Mark Zuckerberg,

for the first time ever,

looked vulnerable last night.

- I actually remember a lot of fear

about TikTok.

Mark seemed like he was actually

concerned

about them overtaking Meta.

The ethos is very much move fast and

break things.

And one way to try to compete with

TikTok was to just move fast.

- It seemed to me, at that time,

that it was almost like this

engagement arms race.

- Mark is very paranoid about

competition.

And so, when he feels like there are

potential competitive forces,

there is no amount of money that is

too much.

- One way to try to compete with

another company that's offering

a unique product is to try to mimic

it.

- And I remember a moment when...

..regular headcount planning process,

and there were some integrity teams

and safety teams

who were going to ask for two

headcount to work on kid stuff

and ten to work on elections.

There was another team who went,

"Oh, we just got 700 for Instagram

Reels."

I was like, "OK."

- Any time you're introducing a new

type of product, say, Reels,

there's an elevated risk,

because the infrastructure that

existed before,

it's either completely absent or it's

very immature.

So it's hard to prepare sufficiently

in advance of that launch.

I was frustrated, because there's a

common trade off

between, like, protecting people from

harmful content and engagement.

- There's another set of documents

that speak specifically about

the difference between TikToks and

Reels.

Reels are similar in how they work to

TikToks.

So, you're getting pushed stuff that

you will show an interest in,

not necessarily from people you know.

And this is Meta's own study,

with stats, shared internally,

where they actively acknowledge that

they are struggling

to prevent harm when it comes to

Reels.

So, stuff like violence and

incitement.

So, you can see here they admit that,

"Comments on Reels posts

"have a higher Violating Hostile

Speech...Prevalence."

So, "75% higher for Bullying and

Harassment,

"19% higher for Hate Speech,"

and, "7% higher for Violence and

Incitement".

And so, essentially, what this

document suggests to me

is that they're building these new

interfaces,

they're introducing these new products

to their sites

to compete with their rivals, like

TikTok,

but yet they're not seemingly putting

the right safeguards

in place in time.

So, their rush to evolve, to grow, to

keep the user engaged

is ultimately leaving users at risk,

which they're admitting.

Why is that happening?

- When you're working on these

integrity teams,

they are disadvantaged, because in

order to launch something

that's going to protect people from

some kind of harm

in Reels or in Feed,

you have to convince the team

that owns Feed, or that owns Reels,

to sign off on the product change

that you want.

But there's this power imbalance.

They have incentives to not let those

products launch,

because toxic stuff gets more

engagement than nontoxic.

- TikTok was really trying to take up

the market,

ship out a new version, improve the

algorithm, maybe every week.

But I started noticing more and more

issues of people using TikTok,

especially more borderline content.

For example, something subtle, like a

conspiracy theory,

or problematic content that will only

be seen after you browse

for more than a certain time.

As the model becomes more advanced, I

think the borderline content issue

become more noticeable.

- In 2022, I remember how social media

feeds were flooded

with borderline content, the grey-area

stuff.

Some of it, clearly, totally

unacceptable.

Maybe that's misinformation or r*cist

hate,

anti-Semitic abuse.

And I was a bit confused, actually,

because it felt like, during the

pandemic,

there had been efforts from the

companies,

the social media companies, to tackle

this borderline stuff -

and it was back again, and back again

with a vengeance, really.

Why was that happening?

I'm so happy that you wanted to speak

to me

and to do this interview.

So, tell me what you actually did as

an engineer.

- I worked at Meta building algorithms

or programmes

to reduce the amount of borderline

content.

And over time, the business

positioning of our team changed

towards, like, allowing more

borderline content.

- Do you think the decision was

connected to

this engagement race with TikTok?

- Yes, it was definitely connected

with that.

You're losing to TikTok,

and therefore your stock price must

suffer.

And then, you know, that's when people

started becoming, like,

sort of very paranoid and, you know,

sort of reactive.

And they were like, "Let's just do

whatever we can to catch up.

"Where can we get like 2%, 3% revenue

for the next quarter?

"Maybe if this stuff is really bad,

then users will stop using the app.

"If they're continuing to use the app,

"then, by definition, it's not bad."

- So, if someone likes harmful

content,

they'll get more harmful content?

- Yeah. You don't care as much about

it,

because they'll continue to use it in

the long term.

- Who ultimately was making those

decisions?

- Senior VP.

And I think he reported directly to

the CEO.

So, they sort of told us that it's

because the stock price is down,

so we might actually come back to this

later.

- It can't have been the most

reassuring thing to hear,

"Oh, we might come back to it at a

later date."

- Yeah, because there's no legal risk,

you know?

No-one actually knows what Facebook is

doing.

So there's actually no incentive for

any of these companies.

- It started with immigration, for me.

I was sort of the perfect candidate.

When I was 13 and 14, I was kind of

struggling with a lot of

insecurities about my ability to have

friends and relationships.

It was very easy for me to believe

that the world was against me.

It made me believe in this idea of

decline.

I started, at first, you know, the

kind of entry-level,

fact-based video essay type.

- It is time to beef up our borders.

- Like, "We just need to reduce

immigration."

Then it goes, slowly but surely, it

starts to recommend you

more and more channels about that.

And then you kind of just go into the

whole ecosystem at large.

And then it goes to, "Our culture is

being changed."

- The sacrificing of our children on

the altar of mass migration.

- "The West, as we all knew it, was

being replaced."

And then you start getting recommended

other fields

in that space, where it then talks

about feminism.

And then talks about LGBT rights.

And then, all of a sudden, you hear

from a perspective

that sounds reasonable at first

and then, a couple months later,

you believe literally everything in

that space.

- Makes some noise for the richest man

in the world.

- Breaking news - Twitter has just

accepted Elon Musk's offer.

- The social media platform is now in

the hands

of the world's richest man.

- I learned on Twitter that Elon Musk

was buying Twitter.

It felt like a bizarre move.

Everybody was trying to understand why

he was doing that.

- In a tweet, Musk wrote, "Entering

Twitter HQ,

"let that sink in."

- I had concerns...

..because of the amount of

resources Twitter was putting in at

that time

to making it a safer platform.

Twitter was never perfect, but it was

the top company priority.

It's, you know,

a rage-based business model in a

sense.

- If the algorithm is left unchecked,

the algorithm could prioritise the

worst possible,

most inflammatory opinions.

Our job was to make sure that,

when you search for something, what

you saw was reliable, true.

We all believed in what we were doing

so much.

- REPORTER:

- Never dull with Elon Musk. Expect

lots of ideas,

lots of changes and lots of

uncertainty.

- Whenever he spoke to us,

he wanted Twitter to be more like

TikTok.

- TikTok has taken America by storm.

- Engagement at TikTok at that time

was just growing phenomenally.

He was focused on making Twitter what

he called hardcore.

- I found out on November 15th that my

access to my work laptop

and my email account were cut in the

middle of the night.

- How did that feel?

- I again was shocked because I

thought at least

the company would have some decency

to give an official notice.

Not something that felt so casual.

- TUCKER CARLSON:

- What percentage of your staff did

you fire at Twitter?

- I think we're about, we're about 20%

of the original size.

- So 80% left?

- Uh, yes.

- We had 250 designers about, of the,

all design-wide,

and there was probably eight of us

left.

The entire Trust and Safety org

almost all was gone at that point,

that wasn't a priority.

- Turns out you don't need all that

many people to run Twitter.

- But 80%? That's a lot.

- Um, yes.

If you're not trying to run some sort

of,

uh, glorified activist organisation...

..and you don't care that much about

censorship,

then you can really let go of a lot of

people, it turns out.

- HE LAUGHS

- I don't think any of us saw it

as getting as bad as it got as quickly

as it got.

- Come on, get back, get back.

- It's good to be back on Twitter.

Don't believe what you read. Don't

believe the mainstream.

- Elon reinstated my Twitter account

after taking it back.

- Some of the people who'd been

banned,

all these names that had caused so

much division, allowed back on.

Because he has sole control of that

platform,

he can tweak and nudge the algorithm

to boost certain kinds

of opinions and push down others.

It is complete gaming of...

..freedom of speech.

- In the Internet Referral Unit, we

see thousands and thousands

of pieces of content every year being

referred to us.

- These are kind of examples that we

see on a daily basis

that shows the normalisation of

the graphic content on social media.

- So people spot stuff and then they

send it to you guys?

- Yeah. So posts were shared on X...

..describing Jews as rodents.

- And it's not just that, really.

I mean, the language is really

extreme.

- No, exactly, it's extreme

anti-Semitism.

It's kind of encouraging further

attacks on Jews,

viewed by thousands upon thousands of

people.

Yeah, we're certainly seeing extreme

right-wing rhetoric.

And the imagery is so graphic and so

overtly r*cist.

And it's kind of increased

to such a level now of this gratuitous

violence, really.

- If a user is seeing more and more of

this kind of stuff,

you can see how they start to find

even more extreme

versions of that imagery. That to me

seems akin

to essentially how radicalisation

works.

- People are more desensitised to

real-world violence,

and they are not afraid to share their

views.

It just made me feel perpetually...

They energised me, but not really in a

good way.

They just made me very kind of angry.

It very much reflected the way I felt

internally,

that I was angry at the people around

me.

It was very easy for me to believe

that the world was against me,

which I think is completely central to

a lot of kind of

hard-right content on YouTube, TikTok.

- NEWSREADER:

- Senator Marco Rubio has announced

bipartisan

legislation to ban TikTok from

operating in the United States.

- Your platform should be banned.

TikTok surveils us all,

and the Chinese Communist Party

is able to use this as a tool to

manipulate America as a whole.

- There were threats being made

against

TikTok because it's owned by ByteDance

- a Chinese company -

by the US government,

that China was going to misuse

sensitive data.

ByteDance has always very strongly

denied that was the case.

But, actually, the information that

TikTok has about us

which is the most powerful

is the way that we linger on a video,

the way we scroll.

As an engineer,

how can you build recommendation

systems that are inherently safe?

HE EXHALES

- That's, uh...

I don't actually know

the answer to that question, about how

to,

you know, build it completely safe

when we have no control on the

deep-learning algorithm.

To us, it's still like a very black

box, how internally it works.

- Which also is, in and of itself,

slightly terrifying,

cos you clearly understand

algorithms...

LAUGHS: ..probably better than anyone

we've spoken to!

- Yeah.

To be honest, we don't

actually pay too much attention to

specific contents.

To us, all the content is just a

different number, OK?

We're the ones that are responsible

for the recommendation and the content

safety team,

they're responsible for eliminating

those bad contents.

Like the car manufacturer, right?

There's a team that are responsible

for the acceleration,

the engine, right? So we expect the

team working on

the braking system was doing a good

job.

- I am looking back through my

messages

with someone who currently works at

TikTok.

And they got back to me earlier this

year, actually.

They sent me a message and we've been

speaking since then,

trying to work out a time when we can

meet each other.

They only wanted to meet me in person.

We've been messaging back and forth on

encrypted channels.

They are working in Trust and Safety,

and there's stuff they're concerned

about.

They want people to know what's

happening on the inside.

It's so hard to get someone to want to

show you stuff.

It's a pretty high-risk thing to do

when you still work there.

Hello.

- Hi.

- So, is this your laptop?

- Yeah.

- OK.

Why have you decided that you want to

speak out,

that you want to show me some of these

documents, conversations?

- If you're feeling guilty on a daily

basis because of

what you're instructed to do, at some

point, you can decide,

"Should I say something?"

- What are the high-risk issues?

What are the things that most concern

you?

- I'll show you.

On the dashboard, the first thing you

can see is volume.

- Now that is a lot of cases.

- Yeah.

The platform is being used by

children.

So it's upon that platform

to be held at a high level of

accountability.

And there's content out there linked

to terrorism...

..sexual violence, physical violence,

abuse,

trafficking.

It feels like it's increasing.

And it's quite damaging

because children are much more easily

influenced.

- So I guess the risk

of being activated in a negative

way...

- Yeah. Especially on a generation

that's literally

hooked to this app.

Look at this, for example.

- Yeah. So these P2, P3, P1,

those all show the level of priority,

essentially.

- Exactly. If you look at the country

where this report comes from,

it's very high-risk because it's a

minor and involves,

you know, sexual blackmail.

- Yeah.

- And then you can see the priority

here.

The urgency is not high at all.

- Priority 2.

- You can see all these are reported.

- Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So very high-risk.

- Yeah.

- Encouraging people to commit crimes,

terrorism or join t*rror1st

organisations.

And that's...

- What, P2?

- And then you have

another case that's classed as P1,

a high-priority case.

- It's a case that relates to a

politician, essentially.

- Just to maintain a strong

relationship,

not because there's a high risk for

the user.

- Looking through all of

these documents from the TikTok

whistle-blower,

I'm just struck by how many of them

point to the same thing,

which is that politics seems

to matter more than protecting kids or

teenagers.

And the case we discussed involving

the 16-year-old girl

who reported that a TikTok account was

posting

her photo alongside explicit images.

And this is priority number 2.

But this is about an under-18 who is

essentially having

a concern relating to explicit images.

And then there's a 17-year-old who is

reporting being

the victim of cyber bullying by two

accounts.

This is priority number 2.

So take, for example, priority number

"In the picture there is a picture of

a chicken..."

And the person is a candidate

of the Iraqi parliamentary election of

So this is in the same country.

You've got a teenager and then you've

got

a politician who's being affected by a

picture of a chicken,

and the politician is P1.

The whistle-blower says that these

kinds of cases happen all the time,

and they are really uncomfortable with

this.

That when kids are at risk, when

under-18s are at risk,

it's not the first thing that they are

tasked with dealing with.

Instead, they're tasked with dealing

with stuff

about politicians or about political

figures,

or in places where it's a priority to

deal with it.

But this, for example, this is

the next wave of stuff they've got to

come to,

and they've already got

loads of examples of cases and harms

that they're looking at.

What would you say to a parent

who has a kid or a teenager that is

using TikTok?

- Delete it.

Keep them as far away as possible from

the app,

for as long as possible.

Hello.

- Hi!

How old were you guys when you started

using social media?

- Like lockdown, so when I was like

nine.

Cos we were at home all the time

and that's the only way I could

communicate with my friends,

so I used it a lot more.

- LAUGHS: Who thinks that they spend

the most time...?

- It's like five hours a day, maybe.

- I'm doing it, like, before school in

the morning,

and then as soon as I get home from

school.

It doesn't make me feel great cos I

probably should have,

like, socialised a bit more, like gone

off my phone a bit more,

but I just get addicted.

So, like, I can't help it and I just

won't stop.

- And do you find yourself...? Does it

tend to be more

what we'd call like short-form video?

So TikTok, Reels, that kind of thing?

- Yeah, just scrolling there for

hours.

THEY CHUCKLE

- I also do that.

Are there things that pop up on your

feed and you think,

"I don't really want to see more of

that"?

- Probably like the same - like

violence.

- Like the bullying, the fighting,

really,

cos I don't like seeing them.

Like, it just makes people think it's

right.

And then you report it and it doesn't

come up for like

a day or two, and then it'll just pop

back up.

- And then I keep doing it and it just

keeps coming back.

- It kind of makes me feel like, "Oh,

they're not listening to me."

I'm telling them I don't want to see

this kind of stuff.

- How do you feel when you see that

kind of content?

- Just really frustrated. Like, I've

told them,

I don't want to see this,

I don't want to see this, over and

over again,

and they just keep it there again.

Because it's not necessarily something

people agree with,

but it has so many views and so many

likes

that they keep putting the videos back

out there

and back out there because people

react with them.

- If I watch too much

and then there's just something that

comes up,

some person online just trying to get

popularity.

I shouldn't get too annoyed about it,

but it's because I'm in that sort of

state

I have a very strong opinion about it,

though it could make me feel quite

annoyed and angry.

- What I found at the time was just

how often

we were seeing the same content again

and again,

that we didn't want to see,

from people we do not know,

way outside of the remit of even what

you would have ever searched.

And I think, when it comes to kids and

teenagers in particular

that was a serious problem because

you're still trying

to work out what's all right and not

OK to do.

And your feed is beginning

to dictate the way that you look at

the world.

- I've been wanting to talk

about this publicly for over a year

now,

and now I've finally worked up the

courage

to talk about things I've kept quite

close to myself.

I started to abandon my old r*cist and

misogynistic views,

as they no longer made any sense to me

in my head.

I think people need to be made aware

that the amount of anger

in a lot of hard-right circles was

extreme.

If the only thing you're hearing

is about asylum seekers committing

really bad offences,

if you're constantly seeing that on

your feed,

then it is going to radicalise you.

Like, 100% it is.

- I know the whole House will be very

concerned at

the extremely serious incident that

has taken place in Southport.

- NEWSREADER:

- Two children have been k*lled in

what police called

a ferocious stabbing at a dance class

in Southport.

- WOMAN:

- And the mother that I was just

consoling.

Just the look on her face

cos she knew something had happened to

her child.

It's like, oh, my gosh, how do you

even comprehend?

There's nothing you can do.

- At Twitter, when we'd have a really

serious news story like that happen,

our job was to make sure that anyone

sharing completely

unverified information would be pushed

down in the algorithm.

The safeguards were taken away.

Because that is the first thing that

Musk did.

There are unsubstantiated opinions

speculating about

the identity of the attacker in

Southport,

and people are listening to them.

And that is a spider web of

misinformation

that grows and grows and grows.

- An undocumented migrant decided to

go into a Taylor Swift

dance class today and stab six little

girls.

- We knew that people with an agenda

could game the algorithm,

could harness this huge amount of

power.

I knew exactly what was going to

happen.

- I remember seeing that on my video.

Like, within hours,

a whole massive crowd descend on the

town.

- A 17-year-old male from Banks in

Lancashire,

who is originally from Cardiff,

has been arrested on suspicion of

m*rder.

- The news is stepping in and saying,

"We know who did this,"

but by then it's too late.

- And then the mosque there is the

first thing that gets desecrated.

- CHEERING AND YELLING

- Get back!

- Get back now! Get back!

- And all of this is self-enforcing,

completely circular.

Because when these things were

happening,

they're then being reported on social

media platforms,

and it spins faster and faster

and people get angrier and angrier.

- SHOUTING

HELICOPTER OVERHEAD

MAN:

- f*cking hell.

- BEEPING, UPROAR

And I remember at that time wanting to

get to

the bottom of who was behind these

false rumours,

allegations suggesting that the

attacker

is an asylum seeker,

that they arrived by boat to the UK,

that they're Muslim.

And I think now, if I look...

..one of the first places that

published some of

the speculation was called Channel3

Now.

It was just sort of pumping out

stories.

And I tracked down someone,

a man called Farhan in Pakistan,

and I finally got this email back.

We're only just trying to, you know,

put news out.

Essentially, we're kind of trying to

get clicks

and we didn't mean to get it wrong.

This is clearly a product of the

algorithms,

the social media systems,

because Channel3 Now wouldn't have

wanted

to post this content had it not known

that it was going to get views and

clicks and likes

if it posted it as quickly as it

possibly could,

even if it was wrong. And, in fact,

it being wrong meant it got more

likes,

more views, more clicks because it got

engagement.

It sparked a reaction, it was emotive.

UPROAR

HELICOPTER OVERHEAD

Southport felt like a real shift.

Like the violence connected to what

was happening on social media,

it's no longer far away.

- We are the canary in the coal mine.

A lot of what goes on and wrong on

social media

was trialled and tested

in countries like Sri Lanka, because

nobody cares about us.

All of our markets are active

experiments,

and so what is now much more evident

in the UK,

in other parts of the world,

was very evident in countries like Sri

Lanka years prior.

So what I have warned against, what I

have cried about,

suggests that this is not a Sri Lankan

problem.

It is a social media problem.

It is a Silicon Valley problem.

It is a governance problem. It is a

democracy problem.

It is a problem for all of us.

Algorithms now impact all our lives.

- CROWD CHANREPORTER:

- Immigration centres targeted

nationwide.

Police overwhelmed.

- SIR KEIR STARMER:

- There have already been hundreds of

arrests.

The criminal law applies online as

well as offline.

Around this time at Meta, there was a

shift.

- It's time to get back to our roots

around

free expression on Facebook and

Instagram.

- They announced that they were

k*lling the fact-checking programme,

and they cut back very severely on

content moderation.

- We're going to simplify our content

policies

and get rid of a bunch of restrictions

on topics

like immigration and gender

that are just out of touch with

mainstream discourse.

- It felt like they lost the

commitment

to combating a lot of

these harms and seeming to just not

really care

about actually listening to the data

and actually trying to solve problems.

- My biggest worry is

the politicisation of these platforms.

Mark was generally trying to be

neutral,

but now Elon, I think,

specifically treats X as a political

outlet for his views.

And I don't think any single company

should be allowed

to have this amount of influence and

power over 4 billion people.

- Can I get a picture, Charlie?

- Charlie!

- Charlie.

- I want Trump to be president. Trump.

- It now feels like we're in a world

increasingly inhabited by a new type

of individual.

- Would you like to have a

conversation?

- Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

- OK.

- Um, I don't like you.

I think you spread hate, I think you

spread bigotry.

I think you piss a lot of people off.

- We record all of it so that we put

it on

the internet so people can see these

ideas collide.

When people stop talking, that's when

you get violence.

- Influencers whose capacity

for generating engagement online is a

huge part of their fame.

GUNSHO- Oh, my God.

- Oh, my gosh, he was just shot.

He was just shot!

- NEWSREADER:

- Charlie Kirk was shot dead while

addressing students on a campus in

Utah.

- Videos of his assassination

reached millions across the globe.

- The k*ller's reasons were initially

unclear.

- Right now, federal investigators say

they are talking to this man, Tyler

Robinson,

about why he might want to k*ll

Charlie Kirk.

- Conspiracies about who he is and

what he believed are flourishing.

- But he'd left some clues at the

scene.

- The inscriptions carved onto the

b*llet casings

that were believed to be owned by the

alleged sh**ter.

- You'd only understand them if you've

spent

a lot of time on social media.

- They contain a number of seemingly

sarcastic,

irreverent phrases that are common in

gaming

and online communities.

- A seemingly ordinary student wrapped

up in a dark,

nihilistic meme culture.

Did the k*ller have one eye

on the online reaction provoked by his

violence?

Are we witnessing a new ideology of

engagement?

Algorithmic systems shaping politics,

shaping society,

shaping how events unfold.

- If I was parenting young children

right now,

I would encourage them to spend as

little time online as possible.

- We have lost lives to this.

We know where this goes.

- Social media platforms have

an essential responsibility to the

truth.

- If we want this sort of

accountability and transparency,

we have to make it legally required.

- Problems are going to get worse.

- I can't continue existing without

trying to fight.