Directed by Moritz Riesewieck & Hans Block
Germany/Brazil | 2018 | Documentary | 88 min | Filipino/English w/English subtitles
Film Source: Gebrueder Beetz
“If you commit one mistake, it could trigger war.” One might assume that quote is attributable to a government official or a high-ranking corporate executive, but it’s actually spoken by a social-media “content moderator” — a job outsourced by Silicon Valley tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter to hourly workers in the Philippines. On one level, The Cleaners profiles the quietly heroic gatekeepers of the Internet — the unrecognized content scrubbers who view up to 25,000 questionable and often horrific images per day and determine if they violate social-media guidelines. But in the wake of Facebook’s struggle to contain hate speech in Myanmar and the company’s role in the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal, German filmmakers Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s documentary is also about the dangers of allowing anonymous people to regulate free speech, and the potential for social-media outlets to compromise democracy. ~LB