“The [social media] companies have more and more power to decide what can stay up and what must be taken down.

“They take advantage of our desire for ease, our resistance to effort, our resistance to challenge, and, I think, over time—if we’re not already there—it will interfere with our ability to have critical thinking.” — David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, in THE CLEANERS

In an office building in Manila, over a thousand content moderators each hit a target of 25,000 removed images per day. 25,000,000 videos and photographs posted to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., are deleted every twenty-four hours at this particular location—one of the world’s largest. The Philippines is 90% Christian, and the moderators’ adherence to concepts like “sin” and “evil”—as well as an inflated sense of their own importance—shade their interpretation of company guidelines.

And, as demonstrated in THE CLEANERS—an incisive new documentary directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck—members of this workforce may lack the historical knowledge that would guarantee accurate assessments. (An image of an American soldier and his dog taunting an Abu Ghraib prisoner is mistaken for an ISIS torture video.)

Hired by the social media empires via third parties to see things that algorithms can’t, the cleaners are exposed to a continuous stream of violence and sexual imagery. One employee asked to be transferred from his division. When he was turned down, he killed himself. Other moderators are compelled to bring their work home in other ways:

“When I went to sleep, I would dream about different kinds of penises. That’s all I saw—penises everywhere. It became my guilty pleasure.”

Videos exposing the Syrian government’s bombardment of its citizens—or satirical art depicting the commander-in-chief in the nude—are flagged as content violations. Yet Facebook executives sit idly by as their platform is used to facilitate the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Among those interviewed for the film are artists Illma Gore and Khaled Barakeh, Manila journalist Ed Lingao, former Silicon Valley policy maker and Obama Administration tech officer Nicole Wong, former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez, Istanbul law professor Yaman Akdeniz, former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, Myanmar activist Nay San Lwin, and Abdulwahab Tahhan of Airwars in London.

 

THE CLEANERS

At 2:20 pm, through Thursday, November 29.

Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills.

From top:

German film poster. Image credit: Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion.

Nicole Wong. Photograph by Ann Hermes.

Illma Gore Instagram. Image credit: Illma Gore.

Below: The Cleaners. Image credit: Sundance Institute.