The price of a "clean" internet

The Cleaners reveals a gigantic shadow industry of digital censorship in Manila, the largest outsourcing location for content moderation. Tens of thousands of people in 10-hour shifts delete incriminating photos and videos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and and Co. on behalf of the big Silicon Valley companies. Censorship or visibility of content is outsourced to "content moderators." Here we meet five "digital scavengers" among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley whose job is to delete "inappropriate" content of the net. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. Where exactly is the point of balance for social media to be neither an unlegislated space nor a forum rife with censorship? The Cleaners struggles to come to terms with this new and disconcerting paradigm. Evolving from a shared social vision of a global village to a web of fake news and radicalization, the film charts the rise and fall of social media’s utopian ideology.

Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers at boutique firms and major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people "behind the screen" offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet, but also the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Who decides what we see? Hundreds of thousands of photos and videos are uploaded to the internet every day. Included in this avalanche is a massive amount of horrifying content, full of violence and pornography. How is it possible that we as normal users see very little of this? Riesewieck combines fascinating reportage with astonishing ideas about the power of pictures. As Riesewieck writes: "What can an indigenous weed, a sixteenth-century oil painting, and a Southeast Asian regionalist novel tell us about the censorship of images on Facebook? More than you might think!"