SXSW: “American Sweatshop” - Film Review
If you think your job is bad, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a content moderator for social media? Think about the times you’ve been minding your business, scrolling through your social media of choice, and you come across a horrifying picture or video. You do your Good Samaritan deed of the day and report it, but have you ever thought about what happens next? With all the things artificial intelligence can do, for some reason it can’t replace humans who manually moderate endless flagged videos. American Sweatshop follows the story of one such human whose job it is to sift through hundreds of videos daily.
Daisy (Lili Reinhart) works at Paladin, a company that seems to be a branch of a larger tech organization, but who decided to separate themselves almost entirely from this team of content moderators. They likely do this to reduce liability should one of the videos manage to break through the screeners. Daisy logs in every morning, puts on her headphones, and clicks play on what’s essentially a playlist of the most violent, intense, and sexual videos available online. She must watch at least 20 seconds of the video before clicking Approve or Delete. Daisy is not the sole moderator. She works in what looks like a warehouse with rows of computers filling every inch of space. While Daisy isn’t doing all that well, she’s managing, until she sees a particularly gruesome video that she can’t shake.
One of the best decisions made by Uta Briesewitz is to never let the audience see the entire video that deeply disturbs Daisy. The pieces are there and we can all put together the puzzle. The audience is shown numerous titles of flagged videos along with some clips, but even if the title says something horrible, like woman jumps off building, we will not see it. What the viewer does see is the eyes of the moderator squinting, trying not to let this make a lasting impression on them for their own mental health. And while it would be gratuitous for us to see these videos, that is the job for these people. Another movie might’ve relished in pushing the envelope, but American Sweatshop is restrained.
While blowing off steam at a happy hour put on by Paladin to boost morale, Daisy and her friends go around the circle and say what their worst video is. The question is posed by Bob (Joel Fry), who has a daily freakout from the horrors of the job. When the new hire (Jeremy Ang Jones) says he doesn’t know, Bob tells him to quit then and there. He says it’s a good thing, because once you have your worst video, you can’t go back. American Sweatshop isn’t perfect, but its existence feels important. There are people spending forty hours a week watching brutality. Bob is written off because of his outbursts, but he points out that it’s good he’s having a reaction. It means he hasn’t gone numb to it. Those are the people who should be cause for concern, he warns.
American Sweatshop’s stumble is in its ending. The film tracks Daisy’s slow loss of reality. She’s willing to travel across state lines, break laws, and violate company policy in order to see justice served. She’s making increasingly reckless and unhealthy decisions, but the film’s final moments lose the momentum that was built throughout the runtime. It’s not a total about-face, but the decision Daisy makes at the end almost borrows a page from Promising Young Woman’s book without Emerald Fennell’s tight pacing. The divisive ending of Promising Young Woman, whether you liked it or not, was earned because every single one of Carey Mulligan’s character’s actions led her there. In American Sweatshop, it’s a little harder to see how Daisy arrived at her ending.
American Sweatshop excels in forcing an audience, for 100 minutes, to consider what life is like for these content moderators, even if the tone of the film is a little inconsistent. The Paladin supervisor (Christiane Paul) reminds employees that they’re not censors and that the key to their job is nuance. One has to wonder what spending every day searching for nuance in videos of abject violence would do to a person. American Sweatshop’s final scene shows Daisy explaining that she thinks there are three types of people in the world: those who do good, those who do harm, and those who watch. A taut psychological thriller with room for some fine-tuning, American Sweatshop urges its viewers to reconsider what it means to consume content.
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