- Welcome to Independent Lens .
I'm Pete Schwaba, host of Wisconsin Public Television's
Director's Cut .
If you participate in social media in any way
then tonight's film is a must see.
The Cleaners is a documentary that investigates
the covert world of digital cleaning.
They work for third-party companies
hired by social media giants like Facebook
and they work in total secrecy.
Most of the cleaners operate
from an office building in the Philippines
and where they view and delete troubling images,
sometimes for up to 16 hours a day.
In any given shift,
some cleaners can delete as many as 25,000 images.
When social media companies first sprung up
they created global communities,
the idea being that greater communication
would create greater understanding.
But as co-directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck show,
in the last few years
these companies have faced unforeseen challenges
to fend off those using these platforms
to spread hate, misinformation, and terror.
Block and Riesewieck
deftly chart the rise and fall
of social media's Utopian ideology.
In doing so, they also reveal
the effects of this work on cleaners
which include a soaring suicide rate
and post traumatic stress
from seeing images of such extreme violence.
The directors were inspired to make the film
when they heard about a video on child abuse
that was posted long enough to be shared over 16,000 times.
It made them question, 'Who is behind controlling
what we see and what we think?'
Cleaners are not allowed to discuss
what they see on the job,
so getting some of these employees to actually talk
on camera was an entirely different challenge.
Sometimes it takes two seasoned documentarians
like Block and Riesewieck to build that trust.
The Cleaners starts now on Wisconsin Public Television,
your home for independent film.