Entertainment

The Cleaners

29. Oct, 2018

You never really see Melbourne’s street cleaners. They do their work under the cover of darkness, in the shadows, while the city sleeps around them. Maybe if you’ve tumbled out of a club at 5am on a Sunday morning you may have seen those little street sweepers, but let’s be honest, you’ve never paid them much attention unless they happened to be blocking your entrance to Hungry Jacks. But without them, our streets would be unliveable. Trash would be everywhere, nothing would function properly – it would be mayhem.

Away from the streets, there’s another type of cleaner who does their work in the shadows, so quietly that most people barely know they exist. Yet, our modern technological society could not function as well without them – they are the digital cleaners.

The Cleaners is a new documentary by German filmmakers Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block that focuses on the content moderators, or ‘cleaners’, of social media. These unseen workers sit in cubicles for hours and hours a day, clicking through thousands and thousands of images and making the morally cumbersome decision whether to hit ‘delete’ or ‘ignore’. This documentary centres around a group of young moderators based in the Philippines, who are hired to scour and scourge the Internet of explicit content and make decisions based on their scruples.

The film rips hastily through a heap of intensely weighty issues surrounding online content, all of which are meaty enough to warrant their own films, but disappointingly get a pretty superficial treatment here in an 88-minute time frame. Topics such as censorship, corporate responsibility, child exploitation, acts of terror, international politics and cultural relations enter the narrative, but disappear before we’re able to really sink our teeth into anything substantial. It seemed as if the filmmakers had a checklist of perspectives they felt they needed to include to achieve a well-rounded doco, and the result is a tangle of mismatched anecdotes and one-liners from a bunch of random industry reps. Diversity in voice is a good thing of course, but in this case a lack of narrative flow made this unstructured, jarring and disengaging.

What the film does well is highlight just how mentally and emotionally challenging it is to be a moderator of online content. The stark, noir tones of the film and the shadowy darkness of the shots paints a bleak image of the life of a cleaner, and encourages the viewer to draw comparisons between this type of work and gruelling factory work. Long hours, no mental health support, and the constant weight of being told that if they make a mistake and let an image slip through the cracks it could potentially “start a war”. The stories from the workers are disturbing and compelling. I can’t even watch one of those pimple squeezing videos without wanting to vomit, so to think about the amount of unsettling content the workers have to engage with is unfathomable.

Another well-executed highlight is the respectful treatment of the devastating genocide of the Rohingya Muslims as the film explores the dangerous role that social media played in the fake news rewrite of Myanmar’s history. The efforts to quash the circulation of propaganda and hate speech is just one of the areas the cleaners are required to moderate, and it’s concerning to imagine that a small group of young people from one predominant culture are responsible for representing the voice of so many.

The Cleaners is an interesting addition to the ongoing discourse surrounding censorship and social media culture. The anecdotes and personal stories from the workers give this film heart and accessibility, but other than that, it was a pretty mediocre documentary. Despite its messy structure and lack of depth, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing this film as I reckon it’s important to remain educated on the tumultuous climate of our online community.

The Cleaners is screening at ACMI until Sunday, 11 November.