'The Cleaners' shows the terrors human content moderators face at work

"Out of sight, out of mind" doesn't work when cleaning out the darkest corners of social media platforms. 

That's what the documentary The Cleaners, which airs Monday night on PBS, reveals about content moderators in the Philippines who are relentlessly bombarded with violent, graphic, and disturbing images and videos. Ahead of the TV release at a San Francisco screening, the filmmakers Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck praised the subjects in the documentary for being "brave enough to talk to us."

Manila has become a de facto headquarters for content moderation for some of the biggest social media and content services like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Twitter, and others. But outsourcing the harmful work doesn't eliminate the problem. Read more...