Enter a hidden third world shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it does not like. Here we meet five ‘digital scavengers’, among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley, whose job is to delete ‘inappropriate’ content from the Internet. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. A typical ‘cleaner’ must observe and rate thousands of often deeply disturbing images and videos every day, leading to lasting psychological impacts. Yet underneath their work lie profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism. Where exactly is the point of balance for social media to be neither an unlegislated space nor a forum rife with censorship? The Cleaners struggles to come to terms with this new and disconcerting paradigm and tells the story of the rise and fall of social media’s utopian ideology.
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