THE CLEANERS

Synopsis

Enter a hidden third world shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn’t like: violence, pornography and political content. Here we meet five “digital scavengers” among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley whose job is to delete “inappropriate” content off of the net. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. Evolving from a shared social vision of a global village to a web of fake news and radicalization, the film charts the rise and fall of social media’s utopian ideology.

Director Biography

Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block became a team in 2007, working under the name Laokoon (named for the priest in Greek mythology who exposed the lie of the Trojan horse) on theater and media projects. The Cleaners is their feature documentary debut that has its roots in a one-man play and radio play by Riesewieck.