I would struggle to recall the title or the specificities of the occupation, but a family friend’s husband had a presentation given to him in which they analysed how aware my generation – Gen Z – was of news and current affairs. Although somewhat politically motivated, a lot of people my age seemed to be living in some sort of wind tunnel where only information that we are interested in knowing is provided to us, thanks to the trusty internet.
“Oh my God!” I thought to myself. “How embarrassing; to be caught out in how little I know of political affairs apart from bits and pieces from Youtube.” Recently I’ve gained a certain type of apathy towards current affairs. I have a vague interest towards certain news issues, and I am opinionated when it comes to politics. However, the ABC, SBS and other media outlets have failed to keep my attention for any meaningful amount of time.
My best friend and I had a conversation, debating about whether we should forgo watching our beloved Youtube news channel Vox as we feared its left leanings were leaving us in a bubble of political complacency.
The Cleaners, a 2018 German documentary by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck discusses this very issue. One of the millennial tech gurus a part of Facebook who is interviewed, states that in fact, it is not just Gen Z falling into this wind tunnel trap, but everyone who is victim to the digital age is not only entitled to their own opinions but their own worlds and set of facts. You can see this in politics today, with an extremely polarised America, as demonstrated with the juxtaposition of the right wing self-acclaimed shit stirrer and left-wing artist who painted Donald Trump with a small penis, titled “Make America Great Again”. We are told in the documentary that the internet is not an unbiased machine, it aims to create the highest amount of engagement and this is easily done through breeding hate.
When you think of how the internet and social media platforms are moderated, you’d probably envision an algorithm that cleans up specific flagged keywords or images. This would be an understandable mistake as these giant corporations aren’t particularly keen to be transparent with the public about this. Manilla (Phillippines) is where the majority of the film takes place and where the real moderators live. Not on computer screens but in houses with families, passions and lives just as complex as the tech gurus living in Silicon Valley creating the tools that these people have to clean up after. These faces that are shown to us in the film with their own stories and opinions on their job are used to show us the repercussions of censorship.
And when I say this word, I mean it in a wholly neutral sense. As implied in The Cleaners, it is important to have some sort of quality control over what is seen and not seen on the internet. Not everything that goes up should necessarily stay up. And at its core, this is the dilemma that the documentary is trying to address to us as viewers. Do people living 7,000 miles away from the content they’re deleting, with a 96% Christian population nationwide really have the ability to make the right historical judgement calls to fairly “clean” the internet? Is the idea of a cleansing for content the right attitude to be attributed to media in the first place?
These questions are asked or rather implied, with fairly foreboding music and ominous lighting. Although I appreciated the documentary for its eye-opening portrayal of digital content and its relevance to my own life, I think it left the audience in despair without giving us the important tools to know how to go about using this information and making the right decisions to stop or improve this band-aid solution censorship. I am glad for the film’s accessibility and I think that had it not been edited to be so much like a crime thriller then it may not have been such an enjoyable watch.
As for whether or not my friend and I decided to boycott Vox, it turned out there was no need; our fickle attention spans stopped consuming those videos but instead turned to lighter information that tended towards pop culture. If you were to be in the habit of snooping and were to look through my search history, you might find the odd video about some crazy ultra right or left wing person spewing hate of some variety but other than that there’d probably be a lot of cat videos.
The Cleaners is a valuable insight for anyone wishing to be more informed of the effects of the internet. 5.5 Zuckerberg’s out of 10.
Arran (18)
The Cleaners
Revelation Perth International Festival
Sydney Film Festival