Ostensibly The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and child pornography, breaking them into binary categories: “ignore,” where they let the post stand, and “delete,” where the imagery is removed for violating community standards.

This is an old article about an older documentary, but I thought it would be interesting to kick up a discussion about how people in Manila (and other places in the Global South) are often the ones left to deal with the worst impacts of social media - including on the moderation side of things.