The Cleaners

The Cleaners (2018) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, co-directed by Moritz Riesewick and Hans Block. The original German title — Im Schatten der Netzwelt, In the Shadow of the Web — describes what the film finds: a hidden workforce based largely in Manila that scrubs the internet of violence, pornography and politically unwanted content on behalf of major tech platforms.

These workers scroll through thousands of images per shift. They make deletion decisions in seconds, and what they remove shapes what billions of people see online. The film shows their faces, their routines and the toll the work takes — then traces the power lines back to Silicon Valley, where the platforms that outsource this labor rarely acknowledge it exists.

Quiet and pointed, it is the kind of journalism that makes you reconsider every piece of content you never had to think about today. Stream The Cleaners (2018) online on iFILM.