The cleaners

It is terrible how internet companies and so called "social media" control our minds and ignore all the elected governments...

The issue presented is the readily fast deletion of information from social media. There are groups of paid cleaners (mostly outsourced) by the Corporate Internet; better known as Social Media. The deletion of facts through corporate policies, government silence, and the protection of family friendly optimism. In one instance being a photograph lacking content that is immediately erased because it shows harm to a child. The moral outrage of the image is that it doesn't belong on social media. The content shows it's an image outlining the government abuses in a country that doesn't have a voice to inform the rest of the world. It takes (maybe) all of 8 seconds to view & delete the image from Facebook. When you ask yourself, what's the best thing to do(?) Remove an image that could scare a young person or allow an image because it needs to be addressed?

'The Cleaners' provides examples of internet censorship and the harm it does to freedom. The current censorship in social media has become harshly political. Moderators with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are free to enforce their own political opinions on a world that can & will disagree with them. Unfortunately the film shows it from the same perspective as a Democratic voter. So much of it points at the current Republican administration that how would a younger audience know it began with the Democratic administration? It draws a line rather than being bold enough to admit both parties are responsible for censorship on a scale as large as the internet.

While it's a very compelling subject and well made on a scene to scene basis, by the time I reached the end of it I couldn't help but feel like it was really scattershot.

It wants to start as a look at the people who moderate content online and branch into a broader documentary about division, conflict, and other problems online, and how social media worsens it... but the transition felt a bit non-existent, and made this feel like two pretty good 40-minute documentaries smashed together.

It's disturbing, thought-provoking, and interesting, but unfortunately a bit all over the place and not very cohesive, perhaps biting off more than it could chew for a documentary under 90 minutes in length.

While this film does probably not much in terms of artistic innovation, I believe it is a highly important contribution to a crucial political topic of the present day. It does a tremendous job at highlighting how near impossible a reasonable navigation between user safety and censorship has become in an age, where the work of competent and deliberate newspaper editors has been delegated - in an intransparent, dispersed-around-the-globe sort of way - to an anonymous crowd of half-competent and often politically, religiously, and economically biased 'content managers', who are forced to capture decency and enlightenment in terms of rules that can be applied in under 8 seconds.

A bald, revealing dive into the belly of the beast - Manilla, where ill-trained and more, dirt-level-paid sub-contract toilers attempt to curate 25,000 wildly sourced and morally divergent posts/images a day for a pittance. The implications for what passes for fact and news on the major social network platforms, and for the demographics that access this information, and often do not access more credible and valid sources, is enormous. Disturbing images are shown, You need to see this hard-hitting, shocking, film. It rates an 11. Disclaimer:after using Facebook from 2008, I happened to have closed my account weeks before. Karma.