(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
At this year's film festival in Rotterdam, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck presented their new documentary The Cleaners. It begins with a dry and worn list of statistics: Worldwide, three billion people are linked through social media. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube alone. In the same period, 450 000 tweets are posted on Twitter and 2,5 millions of posts are posted on Facebook. The Facebook community now has an estimated two billion members – close to a quarter of the world's population. Its influence as a public opinion has been greater than that of any nation state.
Requested to remove "unwanted content"
The Cleaners takes us from the high-tech, spotless workplaces of the company's engineers and their daily lives to dilapidated homes in Manila, where the so-called content moderators, or Facebook's "cleaning aides," are located. Almost everyone is recruited from the street without any background in politics, sociology or psychology, not to mention insight into art theory or various forms of expression. They are only hired to delete. Officially, Facebook is not allowed to hire content control workers in the Philippines, but local outsourcing companies make this possible. It is these agencies that supply Facebook's paycheck.
Worldwide, three billion people are linked through social media.
The filmmakers have been given intimate access to the lives of these cleaning aides, and follow them into their homes, leisure activities, the church, discos, and arcades. Some people take a big risk by taking the leaf out of their mouths – which they do, even though everyone has signed confidentiality statements with their employer. Other statements come from the inside in the form of anonymous emails or excerpts from online communication.
These moderators defend the "principles" they have been instructed to enforce. The filmmakers make a huge effort to capture their mentality, without even interfering. The cleaning aides seem to regard themselves as responsible for making the Facebook platform (and thus the wider world) healthier through their efforts, since suspicious content is prevented from appearing online. Some of them claim that the world is simply insane, and that their role is to fight evil. However, there are moments when their personal perceptions lead to misinterpretations of the situation.
A fragment shows a picture where a soldier is mistaken for an IS member. The image is then removed from the page. In one case, a cleaning aid postulates that state representatives should not be offended on the sides of the platforms. Another compares himself to the controversial President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who has compared his purges in the war on drugs to the Holocaust.
The moderators are asked to "identify terrorism" and are ordered to delete all communications from a questionable compilation of 39 terrorist organizations. But the order is not limited to this; cleaning assistants must also systematically learn these communications for monitoring purposes. The team leaders check the moderators' censorship work in poor three percent of cases. Each employee processes around 25 images a day.
Conservative censorship policy
Following these mechanical rules, there is no doubt that Nick Uts Pulitzer Prize-winning photography of Vietnamese children (including a naked nine-year-old girl) on the run from a napalm attack would have been immediately removed. Similarly, a picture of shipwrecked, naked immigrants would never be allowed. Any allusion to sexual intercourse or even nudity is prohibited. In this way, Facebook uses radical Islamic censorship patterns. As Nicole Wong, a former Google and Twitter boss, confirms, "we are deleting 'what we don't want in our community'".
When does censorship lead to the collapse of the communications, democracy and ultimately the collapse of civilization?
One victim of this censorship policy is Los Angeles-based artist Illma Gore, who uploaded a picture of a naked body with a small penis and Donald Trump's head. We live in a society where this image was shared 15 million times. Trump himself referred to the picture in a public debate shortly afterwards, declaring that there was no problem with the size of his penis. Just a few days later, Illma Gore's Facebook page was closed with all her other accounts on social media. She was short and well-groomed, unable to defend her art, and at the same time lost all the contact details she needed to work, which threatened her livelihood.
Other victims include NGO activists such as the Airwars Section, who must store evidence of attack in war for further evidence analysis and accountability claims. Without their work, aggressors would have freely hired, and even more civilians would have been killed. Airwars Section attempts to store what they can before their web material is deleted or classified as IS propaganda by Facebook. Even their YouTube account was blocked while other accounts were suspended.
In two public hearings in Washington DC – one in front of the Senate Legal Subcommittee on the War on Terrorism on October 31, 2017, the other in front of the Intelligence Committee on November 1 – Google's nonprofit official confirmed that thousands of employees work within the company's Content Control Department ( goodbye, privacy!). Facebook, on the other hand, has been under scrutiny for not doing enough to suppress radical political propaganda, while succumbing to local political forces' demand to erase "annoying" content.
Censorship gains and losses
Facebook itself has said they never wanted to play that role, but instead offer an essential global marketing tool for consumers and suppliers. This strategy has forced the company to give in to various forms of pressure, for example from the Turkish government, which demanded that all regime-critical content be deleted if the company were to gain access to the Turkish market. A geolocated closure then made regime-critical content inaccessible to Turkish IP addresses. On the other hand, Facebook allowed the publication of hate propaganda targeting the Rohingya population – according to the UN's most persecuted minority in the world – in Myanmar and Bangladesh. In communities where the Internet is used exclusively to access Facebook, and where people do not even have an email account, online propaganda is attributed to great importance because of its ability to manipulate and distort reality. The propaganda is accepted as reliable "information", which in extreme cases can lead to genocide. Former Google designer Tristan Harris recalls that local victims had no opportunity to report or counter hate videos. On the contrary, it is in Facebook's interest to deliver messages to the highest possible number of users and potential buyers. Nothing gives more shared messages than indignation.
Censorship
Facebook delivers messages to interest groups, thus reassuring their members' excited minds. Antonio García Martínez, a former product manager at Facebook, states that the company plays an active role in the degradation of our communications capabilities. Each user is verified through Facebook's pre-selected information criteria. The original rule was that everyone had the right to have their own opinion. Today, this understanding has been extended to include one's own reality. "If we give up our values, accepted rules and decent behavior, if we give up the truth, we can no longer establish a democracy." The loss of this communication capacity means the loss of the cornerstone of any healthy democracy, he added.
"We delete 'what we don't want in our community'."
Nicole Wong
The Cleaners asks a fundamental question: Under what circumstances can censorship of information be legitimate, and when does it lead to the collapse of communication, democracy, and ultimately the collapse of civilization? And have we in our grief over what has or has not been erased, neglected the attention to the process where this takes place – and more importantly, to the people behind and whose voices are barely audible in today's media?
