Hacker Cinema
The Cleaners
2018 · Film · short · 5 min
Directed by Nathan Wells, Zach Macias
In this stop-motion homage to 1970s crime films, two hitmen race to clean up their latest job while searching for a piece of evidence that could threaten to unravel their entire operation. All while being tailed by a mysterious figure who shares an eerie interest in finding what they're looking for.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
"The Cleaners" is a great documentary about this.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thecleaners2018
One really eye opening thing that was super obvious in retrospect is the societal context that's required for a lot of the content moderation. No matter how many people you cram into a room in Malaysia, they aren't going to be able to fully appreciate the nuances of things like satire targeted towards a US audience. For the same reason, you can't have a team of well paid moderators in San Francisco moderating political discussions happening in Burma.
This is what makes the problem of content moderation so intractable. There are extreme financial and political incentives trying to evade moderation, and no matter how many people you throw at the problem, from any number of backgrounds, your coverage is still going to be dismal.
Couple that with the fact that this is probabally the most traumatizing job in the world, with incredibly high suicide rates. It's really really hard to build up a moderation team that can make a sizable dent in the flood of horrific content that floods these platforms. Your best bet is a swarm of AI doing its best, and as many humans as you can hire double checking their work, which is the state of moderation on most major platforms.
What you see is those few that actually make it through, what you don't see are the numerous voices that never manage to break trough the noise because they are actively being suppressed.
Take for example the case of Facebook censoring posts with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc aka "Napalm Girl".
Facebook used to censor those with the excuse of "depiction of child nudity", nobody knows how many Facebook posts were deleted over this, as it only came to light after the editor of the largest Norwegian newspaper did use his access and position at the newspaper to draw attention to the issue [0].
It's easy to hand-wave something like that away as "moderation error", but it's really not. American social media companies also censored and deleted photos depicting US torture in Iraqi prisons, like Abu Ghraib. The reasoning? It's apparently "terrorist propaganda/extremist content" [1].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031
[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-the-cleaners-uncovers-secret-world-of-socia.html
I really recommend tracking down the actual documentary, even to this 20+ years web user that whole thing was like a punch to the guts, quite a warning call about the state of the web and the kind of influence and power that particularly social media companies are wielding these day.
It's a whole bunch more complicated than that - I'd highly recommend the Radiolab episode Post No Evil and the documentary The Cleaners for the full story.
Facebook doesn't have a blanket policy of removing violent content, for wholly legitimate reasons. Many users in Mexico very strongly want videos of cartel murders to stay on the site, because they feel that they are important reportage of something that the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to report. Many users in Syria very strongly want videos of IS murders to remain on the site, because they want the world to see the suffering that IS has wrought on their country.
If Facebook just delete all violent content, they're robbing the victims of violence of their voice - it doesn't feel like Facebook are protecting users of their platform, it feels like Facebook are complicit in covering up the crimes of drug cartels and terrorists.
It's not enough to identify that a video is violent - they need to know context. Is this particular video in this particular context a cry for help or a celebration of evil? Will removing this video silence the propaganda of a murderer, or will it help to conceal their crimes? Does this video show the death of an unidentifiable person in an ungoverned warzone, or is it vital evidence that urgently needs to be forwarded to the relevant authorities? For now, only well-trained human beings are capable of making that call.
This sort of dilemma points to the fundamental impossibility of moderating Facebook to the satisfaction of everyone. Some users complain about pornography, so Facebook make a policy to take down the porn. Other users complain that these policies are sexist and protest outside Facebook's offices to free the nipple. Facebook end up with several pages of rules that allow their army of moderators to consistently distinguish between pornographic and empowering nipples, but nobody's really happy with the outcome.
Facebook are doing a really crappy job of looking after their moderators, but that issue is fixable if we apply enough pressure. There are many other problems with moderating Facebook that are far less tractable and have far wider consequences.
> There's no way the US government gets a say on what is allowed or what isn't allowed content wise with the first amendment as it is interpreted in the US.
The US government already has a say over that [0].
That's exactly what Senate hearings about "terrorist propaganda" and "election interference" on social media are all about [1], applying soft-power to send the message "You deal with this, or we will force you to deal with it", thus nudging these companies into self-regulation.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17823280/facebook-twitter-hearings-congress-jack-dorsey-sheryl-sandberg
> there is no censorship of the internet going on to appease the US government
Actually, there is a lot of censorship going on to appease the US government [0]
I wish there was a free source for this, but for whatever reason, it's really hard to find one for that particular documentary.
Which is all the more annoying considering that my payments for German public broadcasting actually financed the production of it.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/
They never could, particularly not Germany or the UK.
But the US also isn't as innocent as many love to pretend when talking about "state censorship", not even acknowledging how the US doesn't need to "state censor" but merely applies soft-pressure to US companies to do the censoring for them [0].
[0] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/
Any chance you are talking about The Cleaners [0]? Because that was also my first thought when reading this.
Tho it's not actually by PBS, it was originally produced by the cooperation of French and German public broadcasting.
But I'm glad it's finally available somewhere again. The original, publicly funded release was depublished after 3 weeks due to specialties of the public broadcasting agreements. They have to depublish a lot of media after only a few weeks or else it's considered an "unfair disadvantage" for private media companies.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/