The Cleaners
A film by Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck
When you post something on the web, can you be sure it stays there? Enter a hidden shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn‘t like.A film by Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck
Runtime: 78 minutes
Closed Captioning included
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Enter a hidden third world shadow industry of digi-tal cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn‘t like. 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 dramati-cally affected by online censorship. A typical “cleaner” must observe and rate thousands of often deeply disturbing images and videos every day, leading to lasting psychological impacts.
Yet underneath their work lie profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism. 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.
"A movie of the moment" - The Verge
“A neon-lit documentary shot like a noir thriller" - Variety
“A riveting documentary...as if a Frankenstein's monster is out of control" - Screen International
“Disturbing on several levels" - Los Angeles Times