Advertise on podcast: Everything Is Fake

Have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, fake? Online there's a daily avalanche of dubious advice and information - about health, money, success, happiness - much of it delivered with total confidence and little regard for evidence. There's the fabricated reviews, inflated metrics and synthetic content. Influencers present themselves as authorities. The 'fake it till you make it' mantra has hardened into the business model. Everything is now content. Performed for likes, not tested for truth. Meanwhile, institutions once trusted to tell us what is true now compete for attention like everyone else - just as new technologies emerge that can generate convincing false information at scale. How did we get here? What can we do about it? And, well, do we really care? In this six-part series Jamie Bartlett sets out to understand how fakery stopped being a flaw and became the operating system of modern life. This isn't a series about individual liars or shysters. It's about the cultural conditions that made modern fakery not just possible, but incentivised, rewarded, and often indistinguishable from success. From the scripted spectacle of 1980s professional wrestling to the collapse of the global financial system, Jamie traces the incentives that normalised our fake world. Along the way, he's joined by his AI companion, Jimmy Botlett. The series builds towards one urgent question: in a future shaped by generative AI and synthetic media, how will we tell fact from fakery - and will we even care enough to try? Credits: Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

Jamie Bartlett is not Steven Bartlett. People mix them up more than you might think - but there is an important difference: Steven Bartlett is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet, and Jamie is not. So what does Steven have that Jamie doesn't? And what does the answer tell us about the world we now live in? In this first episode, Jamie digs into the origin stories of the UK's podcast kings - and discovers that in 2025, working out what's true, what's embellished, and what's just a really good story is harder than it sounds. He also builds himself an AI companion, Jimmy Botlett, because if he's going to get to the bottom of how fakery took over the world, he's going to need all the help he can get. Credits: Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

In episode two, Jamie ventures into the strange world of 1980s WWF wrestling - where performers and fans share an unspoken agreement to treat the whole spectacle as real. A shared illusion where everyone knows it's fake, but plays along because it feels true. It sounds like harmless fun. And for a while, it was. But Jamie soon wonders: what happens when an idea like that escapes the ring and changes the world? Credits: Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

In 1987, the same year Hulk Hogan body-slammed Andre the Giant, something else happened that would change America's relationship with the truth forever - a Washington regulator abolished the law that required broadcasters to present both sides of an argument. What followed was Morton Downey Jr, a furious chain-smoking provocateur who discovered that outrage was more compelling than accuracy. And Oprah Winfrey, who found that sincerity and emotional honesty could be just as powerful. Together, they popularised an idea that has quietly shaped the world we live in - that your truth is just as valid as the truth. Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

In the early 2000s, a young man in New Jersey was writing thousands of fake university essays for paying students. Around the same time, financial analysts in New York were rating toxic debt as safe. And in Silicon Valley, a new business philosophy was taking hold: fake it till you make it. Jamie Bartlett asks how so many people, in so many different worlds, arrived at the same conclusion at the same time. The answer, he thinks, has a name - The Lance Armstrong Defence. A quiet, creeping logic that says everyone else is doing it so why can't I? Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

Jamie sits down with Dr Aseem Malhotra, the cardiologist who reaches millions through alternative media with his claims about Covid vaccines - and who is, he says, nervous about talking to the BBC. Jamie goes through his arguments carefully, with an open mind. But the harder question isn't whether Malhotra is right or wrong. It's what it means that so many people trust him more than they trust the institutions that are supposed to tell us the truth. Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.

Jamie and his AI companion Jimmy Botlett become increasingly difficult to tell apart as they bring you the final chapter of this story - featuring Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, who now wishes he'd thought harder about the consequences. Plus we hear claims that an engineer is building something rather frightening at one of the big AI companies. But what's true, what's fake, and what does any of it say about what's happening to all of us, right now? Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speight Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah Original music: Coach Conrad Editor: Craig Templeton Smith A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4

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 information free. But social media didn’t turn out that way. Instead of setting information free – a new digital elite conquered the world and turned themselves into the most powerful people on the planet. Now, they get to decide what billions of us see every day. They can amplify you. They can delete you. Their platforms can be used to coordinate social movements and insurrections. A content moderator thousands of miles away can change your life. What does this mean for democracy – and our shared reality? Jamie Bartlett traces the story of how and why social media have become the new information gatekeepers, and what the decisions they make mean for all of us.

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 Capitol in Washington DC. And that’s the moment that catches Jamie Bartlett’s eye. A few days after the riot, on January 9th 2021, the outgoing leader of the United States is suspended on social media. First Twitter, (renamed X), and then Facebook. A President silenced. It’s a glimpse behind the curtain. For the first time millions of us can see the power of technology companies. They can delete you. They can amplify you. They can change your life. Social media has conquered the world. Jamie Bartlett follows the roots of this story back to San Francisco : the home of Big Tech, where he meets one of the early pioneers of social media who tells him about a strange hand bound book, passed around hippy communes in the summer of love, and how it turned the world upside down. Archive Credits: Wolf of Wall Street, Paramount Pictures; Telecommunications Bill sign in, C-Span 1996; Bloomberg's TicTic 2019; Fox News 2020 Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Music: Jeremy Warmsley Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Researchers: Rachael Fulton, Elizabeth Ann Duffy and Juliet Conway Executive Producer: Peter McManus Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke. A BBC Scotland Production for BBC Radio 4 New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 the attention of Silicon Valley’s most successful - but controversial - venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. The company starts to scale up. But there’s one problem - how is it going to make money? Contributors: Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe; journalist Owen Thomas; Eric Jackson, author of The Paypal Wars; Jeff Hammerbacher; Anil Dash, tech entrepreneur. Producer: Caitlin Smith Researchers: Rachael Fulton, Elizabeth Ann Duffy and Juliet Conway Executive Producer: Peter McManus Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Music: Jeremy Warmsley Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke A BBC Scotland Production for BBC Radio 4 Archive: Bloomberg Quicktake, October 2019; C-Span, Telecommunications Bill signing, Feb 1996; Hoover Institute, Decemeber 2009; Startup Academy, March 2018; Makers, December 2012. New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 as the dream to connect everyone is being realised - at the height of technological optimism - everything starts to fall apart. Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Designer: Eloise Whitmore Mix: Gav Murchie Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Executive Producer: Peter McManus + Heather Kane-Darling Research: Rachael Fulton, Elizabeth Ann Duffy and Juliet Conway Commissioned by Dan Clarke Archive: C-NET Jan 2007; The Obama White House Archive, April 2011; C-Span, December 2008; C-Span 1996. New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 sock puppet network of social media accounts, all pushing for the election of a strong leader. Someone like Rodrigo Duterte. Maria is suspicious. She makes an urgent call to Facebook. In Veles, in Macedonia, a young man called 'Marco' starts writing fake articles and posting them online. Very soon they're being read by millions of people around the globe and he's making huge sums of money. The online ecosystem is under attack. Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound design and mix: Eloise Whitmore Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Exec: Peter McManus Researcher: Juliet Conway and Elizabeth Ann Duffy Commissioned by Dan Clarke Archive: BBC News, AP Archive, Bloomberg Television, CNN New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 looking at content: the non-chronological feed. Now, instead of seeing what your friends were posting in the order they were posting it, an algorithm brought you stuff based on search history, likes, and interactions. That’s how tech engineers saw things back then - not just at Instagram, but at Pinterest, and other platforms too - if you engage with something, that must mean you want more of it. Ian Russell believes that this algorithmic change may have altered the course of his 14 year old daughter Molly's life. Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Execuitve Producer: Peter McManus Commissioner: Dan Clarke A BBC Scotland Production for Radio 4. Archive: 'Instagram implements big changes to users' feed, ditches chronologixal content' DT Daily; March 16th 2016. US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Nov 7th 2023 If you are suffering distress or despair and need support, including urgent support, a list of organisations that can help is available at bbc.co.uk/actionline. New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 make. They need to come up with ways of making their platforms safer. One route is a radical overhaul of the entire business model. The other is the biggest digital clean-up operation ever attempted, spanning hundreds of langauges and countries. Which path will they take? Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Executive Producer: Peter McManus Commissioned by Dan Clarke A BBC Scotland Production for BBC Radio 4. Archive: C-Net, April 2018; CBS News, 2020; Tucker Carlson on Fox News; BBC News 2021; EU Debates Tv, 2021 New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u

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 lawsuit against Meta. Abrham believes that company is partly responsible for the death of his dad - a renowned chemistry professor - who was slandered and doxxed on Facebook, before being shot outside his home. Abrham says he reported the posts multiple times but they were not taken down, until eight days after the killing. Jamie meets the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who tells him that her decision to leak Meta's internal documents was driven by grave concerns about the way Meta operates in the Global South. Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Design: Eloise Whitmore Story Consultant: Kirsty Williams Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Senior Producer: Peter McManus Commissioned by Dan Clarke for BBC Radio 4. Archive: C:Span, October 2021 New episodes released on Mondays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the latest episodes of The Gatekeepers, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3Ui661u