The CleanersHans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Who decides whether or not something should appear on Facebook? Can we create a social media platform where violence or hatred is never promoted? Or is this censorship? This neo-noir thriller explores who has the power to decide what we do or do not see. In January, this documentary was nominated in the World Cinema Documentary category at the Sundance film festival.

Anonymous men and women working in small, dark offices are given a few seconds to decide whether an image is right or wrong, permissible or not. Is it publishable or should it be censored? This amounts to no less than 25,000 Facebook posts per day. Some images clearly cross a line of admissibility but others are trickier. What about a nude painting of Trump, for example? Funny or offensive? This raises ethical questions about how far platforms such as Facebook can go in censoring the images of their users. Is giving this power to strangers a good way to censor? The film makes it clear that although Facebook is a large company, it also consists of individuals who feed the machine with photos, data and status updates. These individual employees in their office decide which images actually appear online. As Variety describes it: the conscience of Facebook is outsourced. Block and Riesewieck follow the employees but at the same time they also look for the people who are influenced by their decisions.



Society Justice Media

Vertoond op editie(s) 2018
Screened at edition(s) 2018

Info

Directed by Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
Brazil, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, US
2018 90 min.
English, Spanish
Subtitles: English

Programme

ConScience

credits
Director

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Producer

Christian Beetz, Georg Tschurtschenthaler

Cinematography

Axel Schneppat, Max Preiss

Editing

Philipp Gromov, Hans-Jörg Weissbrich, Markus CM Schmidt

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