1. We Are as Gods

Everything Is Fake

The episode traces the origins of modern social media moderation, opening with the January 6 Capitol riot and Twitter's unprecedented suspension of Donald Trump. It then flashes back to the late 1980s counterculture movement,

Key takeaways

• Twitter policy lead Anika Collier-Navarro and executive Yoel Roth manually reviewed over 140 labeled Trump tweets before suspending his account on January 6, 2021.
• Stuart Brand's *Whole Earth Catalogue* served as a foundational text for Silicon Valley pioneers, with Steve Jobs calling it one of the 'Bibles' of his generation.

Main topics

• Social media content moderation
• January 6 Capitol riot & Trump suspension

Notable quotes

"We are as gods, we might as well get good at it."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a historical framework for understanding how tech platforms evolved from

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 7 (0:05) The Signal Awards just announced finalists for the best podcasts of 2026. Now it's your turn. From September 29th to October 15th, you decide your favorite shows, hosts, and more in the Listener's Choice Awards. Visit vote.signalaward.com to see finalists in categories like Most Innovative Audio Experience. Make your picks at vote.signalaward.com and tell a friend. Don't wait. Speaker 2 (0:37) BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Speaker 8 (0:41) You're about to listen to The Gatekeepers. Episodes will be released on Mondays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen before anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds. Speaker 8 (0:56) 6th of January 2021, Washington DC. Speaker 2 (1:00) We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol. Speaker 8 (1:08) President Donald Trump urges his supporters to march on the Capitol as Congress is certifying the results of the election. Speaker 2 (1:17) And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. Speaker 8 (1:25) Violence erupts. A mob scales the wall of the Capitol building. Speaker 2 (1:30) We're home for life! We're home for life! We need to hold the doors of the Capitol. Speaker 8 (1:37) Miles away from the noise and the rage engulfing DC, there's another group of people, all with more real power at their fingertips than anyone on the streets. Some are in beanbag-strewn offices in Silicon Valley. Others are working from home swigging coffee. All are watching their screens. Speaker 2 (1:59) Pence lied to us. He's a total treasonous pig. and his name will be mugged forever. Now the real battle begins. Speaker 3 (2:08) I woke up that morning, I didn't sleep, but when I eventually got up, I was pacing my floor, going back and forth, back and forth, in my little tiny New York City apartment, literally waiting for someone to get shot or for something bad to happen. Speaker 8 (2:23) Anika Collier-Navaroli has access to the whole Twitter network. She can see how the platform is being used to coordinate this insurrection. She'd been working for Twitter for two years. Her job is to write the rules about what is or isn't allowed on the platform. What me, you and millions of other people get to post. Her university dissertation, which she wrote a few years earlier, was titled The Revolution Will Be Tweeted. It's ironic, she thinks to herself, that I'm watching this unfold in real time. Speaker 3 (3:06) I jumped on Twitter and I started taking down tweets myself, right? And so at the time, you know, hashtag execute Mike Pence started trending and people were literally talking about executing and calling for and were saying, you know, I'm here, let's go get him and kill him, right? And so I was taking those down live. And so I felt like I was like a... digital capital service, like security person. Speaker 8 (3:33) While Anika is trying to stop people getting killed, her colleague Yoel Roth is in his home office in San Francisco, wondering what to do about Twitter's most influential user, the person who some people think caused this whole uprising in the first place. Speaker 6 (3:51) Between election day 2020 and January the 6th, Twitter labeled more than 140 tweets from Donald Trump as misinformation. Speaker 2 (4:01) People were screaming, stop the count and we demand transparency as legal observers were refused admittance to count rooms. Speaker 8 (4:10) By the way, we're using an AI voice generated Donald Trump to voice up his tweets. We Speaker 6 (4:17) kept labeling them and he kept posting them. Speaker 2 (4:20) This election was rigged. I Speaker 6 (4:22) remember every morning at About 3 a.m. Pacific, 6 a.m. Eastern, he would wake up and tweet misinformation. Speaker 2 (4:30) The 2020 election was a total scam. We won by a lot. And Speaker 6 (4:36) I would get woken up every single time to approve the decision to label his posts. For months. Speaker 8 (4:43) That had made Yoel a figure of hate in Republican and alt-right circles. He'd learned to live with having his photo on the front page of the New York Post or being attacked on Fox News. But this was different. Things had taken a violent turn. Speaker 6 (5:00) That day there were a series of calls between myself and other executives and we realized we have to do this. Speaker 6 (5:11) And then we did it. Speaker 2 (5:16) You can see this on screen right now. The president's Twitter account has been suspended. If you go to at real Donald Trump, it says account suspended. Everything has been sort of wiped off. Speaker 1 (5:29) Who actually pushes? I am not Speaker 6 (5:32) going to answer that question. It Speaker 1 (5:33) wasn't me. Someone pushes a button and just wipes out the right. You're off. Let's see what happens next. Speaker 6 (5:40) Yeah, pretty Speaker 8 (5:41) much. The unofficial mouthpiece of the President of the United States has been taken away. Speaker 8 (5:49) January 6th, 2021 was a wake-up call for American democracy. It was the first time since the burning of Washington in 1812 that the Capitol had come under attack. Seven people died. But something else happened that day. I think it was the first time that millions of people saw the power of these technology companies and how people like Anika and Yoel can change the course of history. Speaker 3 (6:18) I don't know when we stop living in the repercussions of the decisions that social media and people like myself were making and continue to make. Speaker 8 (6:33) They can delete you. They can amplify you. They can silence presidents. They can change your life. Speaker 8 (6:50) Donald Trump being banned from Twitter is just one example. Whether it's pushing self-harm content to teenage girls or banning inaccurate stories about COVID, every day social media companies make decisions with consequences that affect our lives. How did it happen that these tech titans get to decide what we see and when? At what cost? And where are they taking us next? Over the next eight episodes, I'm going to find out. I'm Jamie Bartlett, and from BBC Radio 4, this is The Gatekeepers. Speaker 8 (7:37) Episode 1. We are as gods. Speaker 8 (7:47) I've come to where it all started, to the home of big