Algorithm and blues: a watershed social-media verdict
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
A jury in California agreed with a plaintiff who argued that Meta and Google, two social-media giants, designed their platforms to be addictive. That opens the floodgates to more litigation and perhaps to regulatory change. We examine the world’s maritime chokepoints and how they shape geopolitics—littorally, not figuratively. And how digitally animated films came to dominate the box office.
Guests and host:
- Tom Wainwright, media editor
- Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor
- Alex Selby-Boothroyd, head of data journalism
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- social-media sites, internet use, online addiction
- geopolitics, chokepoints, Strait of Hormuz
- animated films
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:13.2 | I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:15.0 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:25.1 | Thank you. fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. As the war in Iran is making crystal clear once again, geography really matters to geopolitics. |
| 0:32.5 | We go around the globe looking at the maritime bottlenecks that have the power to shape |
| 0:37.0 | both commerce and conflict. |
| 0:40.3 | And animated films used to be a tiny part of the broader cinema diet. |
| 0:46.3 | Not so anymore. Kids love them, adults love them, studios love them. |
| 0:51.3 | We ask why they've become so reliably popular and lucrative. |
| 0:55.0 | But first... |
| 1:06.0 | As social media platforms have proliferated and consolidated and honed their games, |
| 1:15.6 | a whole new vocabulary has developed around them. |
| 1:19.1 | In web and then app design, the infinite scroll was in innovation. |
| 1:23.8 | No more clicking through pages that loaded one by one. |
| 1:26.6 | By the late 2010s came doom scrolling, a sense that as users were compelled to slide further into that infinitude, existential dread came along for the ride. |
| 1:36.3 | This one pan, chicken and potatoes, is my kid's favorite dinner. |
| 1:39.3 | I'm going to shoot this 2,000 pound highway barrier with higher and higher caliber bullets all the way up to a 50-Cal |
| 1:45.1 | and see what it can stop. Brain rot, bed rotting goblin mode, all weird neologisms that reflect |
| 1:51.8 | how compelling, even addictive, all that content can be. You're about to watch the best shot in |
| 1:58.5 | golf history. Are you curious to know what exercises Cristiano Ronaldo does for a six-pack? |
| 2:03.4 | I need to lose 40 pounds for my vacation. |
... |
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