PAYING THE TROLL TOLL
Hot Docs Festival plays host to films that look at who suffers from social media’s dark side,
To filmmaker Cynthia Lowen, news of the recent mass killing in Toronto came with a grim confirmation that misogynistic online behaviour leads to realworld violence.
Alek Minassian, who allegedly mowed down 25 people in Toronto — killing 10 — apparently expressed anger at women in a Facebook post before his April 23 rampage, drawing praise from the dark world of online haters.
“I sit up and play close attention when (police) are investigating that the last thing this person may have done before they went out and committed these atrocious acts of violence was to express misogynistic thoughts on a social media platform,” said Lowen, whose new film
Netizens, premiering at Hot Docs, profiles the struggles of women fighting misogynistic online hate.
In The Cleaners, first-time documentarians Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck explore a broader aspect of social media, the shadowy world of “content moderators” for companies like Facebook, employing workers in places such as Manila who labour under a veil of secrecy and suffer enormous personal consequences.
“Most of the billions of people in the world who use social media don’t have any clue who does the cleanup work for them. We don’t know there are thousands of young workers in the developing world who sacrifice themselves in order to keep us ‘safe’ and provide us with a ‘healthy environment’ when we go online,” Riesewieck said.
“It is a very secretive and hidden industry. The companies do everything to keep the work secret. The companies use codewords to hide which companies they are working for. Facebook, for example, is called the ‘Honeybadger Project.’ The workers must keep their job secret. Otherwise they are sued. There are private security firms that pressure workers not to talk to strangers,” Block said.
In exploring how women were victimized online, Lowen said she found parallels from her previous film Bully (2011), which explored bullying in schools, both in the behaviour of the perpetrators and the reaction of social media companies and the police.
“Site operators and law enforcement were not intervening in a meaningful way and there seemed to be this attitude of, ‘It’s just the internet, it’s only online.’ It was a kind of normalizing of the kind of violence that is really ubiquitous for a lot of (women). It’s just boys being boys or that the onus was on the victims to change their lives and their routines to accommodate for the abuse,” Lowen said.
“I don’t think this is normal and I don’t necessarily think this is something we should accept as part of our online digital communities. Perhaps if I can show how this transforms every aspect of a target’s life, that attitude that this is something normal or something we should accept would begin to shift,” she added.
In The Cleaners, we hear poignant firsthand accounts from workers with onerous workloads — such as having to screen 25,000 images daily — who must regularly view sexual exploitation and violence and the serious psychological scars that ensue.
“The symptoms content moderators often face ... are similar to the post-traumatic stress disorder soldiers suffer from who come back from war. Is it any wonder content moderators who see rape videos and other kinds of sexual violence for eight to 10 hours per day are not interested in sex at all anymore?” Block said.
“Is it any wonder content moderators who have seen thousands of beheadings cannot trust in other humans anymore, lose all their social relationships, develop sleeping or eating disorders? Is it any wonder there is a seriously increased suicide rate among content moderators?”
Lowen sees glimmers of hope in combating online misogyny in the citizen activism of groups like the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and a gradual change in attitudes among politicians.
“When I started this film, very few states had laws on non-consensual pornography or what is mislabelled ‘revenge porn.’ Now, 12 states have some form of ‘revenge porn’ law,” Lowen said.
But Riesewieck and Block are far less assured that genuine change is on the way.
“(Facebook CEO Mark) Zuckerberg and others claim they want to make the world more open and connected. By our investigations about social media and their policies we discovered quite the opposite: a completely in-transparent, secretive industry (with) a code of silence around any kind of problems and mistakes,” Riesewieck said.