The Cleaners (2018 film)

The Cleaners is a 2018 documentary film directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck. The documentary details the work experience of content moderators who have to decide which content needs to be removed by employing a moderation system for social media websites.[1]

The Cleaners
Official Poster of Movie documentary The Cleaners.
Directed byHans Block
Written byHans Block
Produced byChristhian Beetz
CinematographyJan Miserre
CountryGermany
LanguageGerman

The film won seven awards and was nominated for nine more. The Cleaners shines a light on a corner of the internet that is meant to be hidden from the average user. The film contrasts the poverty of those who work in content moderation and those in the technology profiting off of their labor.[2] Run Time: 88 minutes[2]

Content

The film presents a mix of documented material featuring expert interviews with Sarah T. Roberts, David Kaye, Tristan Harris, Antonio García Martínez as well as artists including Illma Gore, Khaled Barakeh and Sabo were also interviewed for Cleaners.

Besides that a large amount of interviews with former content moderators from Manila highlights the personal problems they face by having to decided whether to ignore or delete pictures and/ or videos displaying violence, sexual child exploitation, beheadings and suicide.[3]

Recorded content by Nicole Wong, Mark Zuckerberg, senator Lindsey Graham, and the former president Donald Trump, which was not created for this documentary was also included to illustrate their point of view.

The question linking all this material is if the decisions to keep or delete certain content does not distort our understanding of the world. The content moderators hired by Silicon Valley leaders like Facebook and Google do have an influence on what people around the world get to see and thus think.[4]

Awards
  • Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival (2019)[5]
  • German Directors Award Metropolis (2018); Best Director Feature Film, Best Director Documentary
  • International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (2018)
  • It's All True - International Documentary Film Festival (2018)[6]
  • Moscow International Film Festival (2018)[7]
  • Prix Europa (2018)[8]

Nominations
  • Adelaide Film Festival (2018)
  • DocsBarcelona, ES (2018)
  • Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival (2018)
  • German Television Awards (2019)
  • Jerusalem Film Festival (2018)
  • Reykjavik International Film Festival (2018)
  • Santiago International Film Festival - SANFIC (2018)
  • Sundance Film Festival (2018)
  • Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival (2018)

References
  1. Bishop, Bryan (21 January 2018). "The Cleaners is a riveting documentary about how social media might be ruining the world". The Verge. The Verge. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  2. "The Cleaners". Sundance Institute. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  3. Cabana, Ysh (7 December 2018). "Film Review: The Cleaners (2018) The scary side of cleaning social media sites in the Philippines". The Philippine Reporter. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
  4. "The Cleaners. About the documentary". Independent Lens. Retrieved 9 September 2022.
  5. "Docudays UA 2019 Awards". Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  6. "Edition 2018". E Tudo Verdade. E Tudo Verdade. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  7. "Moscow International Film Festival". MUBI. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  8. "Prix Europa 2018 Winners". Prix Europa. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
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