The Cleaners
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. Who is controlling what we see - and what we think?
In the documentary THE CLEANERS we meet five ‘digital scavengers’ 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.
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.