Just because you posted a tweet, a blog or anything else online doesn’t necessarily mean it stays there. In The Cleaners, PBS’ weekly documentary series Independent Lens looks at the people, known as content moderators, who are tasked with removing certain content from the internet.

The documentary spends time with five of these so-called digital cleaners who work from the Philippines and spend each day scanning the internet, deciding what to keep and what to delete. It also talks with Silicon Valley leaders, lawyers and others who have been affected by this shadowy process.

“Eighty-one percent of adult Americans use the internet and almost three-quarters of these regularly use Facebook. The Cleaners tells the little-known story of how Facebook, Google and other online portals monitor the content they distribute, which has an enormous effect on what we see and think,” said Lois Vossen, Independent Lens executive producer, in a statement. “In a time of ‘fake news,’ partisan tensions and eroding trust, The Cleaners sheds essential light on how Silicon Valley controls what we see — decisions that can alter our opinions, our values and our political climate.”

Among the participants are:

— Nicole Wong, an attorney specializing in Internet, media and intellectual property law. She served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Google and Legal Director of Products at Twitter. She also served in the Obama administration as White House deputy chief technology officer (CTO).

— Antonio Garcia Martinez, former product manager for Facebook and author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (2016), an autobiography that details his experiences with launching a tech startup, selling it to Twitter, and working at Facebook from its pre-IPO stage.

— Tristan Harris, who spent three years as a Google design ethicist, developing a framework for how technology should “ethically” steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens.

In 2016, he left Google to work on reforming the attention economy with the non-profit initiative Time Well Spent, which “aims to catalyze a rapid, coordinated change among technology companies through public advocacy, the development of ethical design standards, design education and policy recommendations to protect minds from nefarious manipulation.”

— Illma Gore, a Los Angeles-based artist whose work was banned from Facebook in 2016 after she posted a painting depicting a nude Donald Trump.

— Abdulwahab Tahhan, a Syrian working for the non-profit project AIRWARS in London that helps to track down and archive photos and videos of the war in Syria that are uploaded onto social media sites such as YouTube. These war documents are often deleted because they depict violence.

— Khaled Barakeh, a Syrian photographer and visual artist living and working in Berlin. Hoping to raise awareness of the horrors of the Syrian war, he has posted photographs of dead refugee children who were killed during the war or on their flight from Syria. These pictures were deleted from Facebook.

— Yaman Akdeniz, a specialist in digital law at the Bilgi University in Istanbul, the founder and director of Cyber-Rights.Org, and the co-founder of BilgiEdinmeHakki.org, a group working in the field of freedom of information law in Turkey.

— Sabo, right-wing street artist and activist based in Los Angeles.

— Nay San Lwin, Rohingya activist and blogger.

— Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor in the department of information studies at UCLA. Her work focuses on information labor and laborers, particularly in the digital context, with special emphasis focused on the practice and practitioners of Commercial Content Moderation (CCM), a term she coined.

— and David Kaye, UN Special Commissioner for Freedom of Speech on the Internet.

Directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, The Cleaners premieres on Independent Lens Monday, November 12, 2018, at 10 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS. It will be available for online viewing starting Tuesday, Nov. 13.

Tags: independent lens pbs the cleaner


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