‘American Sweatshop’ Review: Could Content Moderators Have the Toughest Job of the 21st Century? A Chilling Indie Suggests as Much

Daisy Morris (Lili Reinhart) has one of the unhealthiest jobs imaginable — not inhaling asbestos all day or scraping toxic sludge from public spaces, but not all that different either. As an online content moderator, she’s part of a team that reviews violent and offensive videos, which means spending soul-sucking hours watching the worst the internet has to offer (vile clips with names like “fetus in blender”). There’s only so much someone in her position can take.

Confronting ideas of free speech our founding fathers couldn’t possibly have imagined, Uta Briesewitz’s sleek, unsettling “American Sweatshop” presents the female version of an angry Paul Schrader character. Think Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver” or George C. Scott in “Hardcore”: dudes who flip out when confronted by how dark the world can get. Here we have a seemingly level-headed woman who sees what looks like a snuff film, and rather than simply deleting it, she resolves to track down the sickos responsible.

That part of the plot can feel a little contrived at times, since Daisy doesn’t personally know the victim (if that’s the word for the female participant in the sick, yet seemingly consensual pornographic clip). She can’t even be sure that what she’s watching is real, although it’s hard to blame her for flipping out, after all the other garbage she’s forced to endure all day. Just think how spending half an hour scrolling through posts on social media can affect your mood; now imagine the desensitizing/infuriating/triggering impact an entire workday of evaluating the most inappropriate videos must have.

No wonder Mark Zuckerberg nixed the content moderating services on his own platforms — a decision that’s a lot more complicated, obviously, but the kind of thing “American Sweatshop” gets audiences thinking about. Daisy’s foolhardy (and undoubtedly dangerous) mission to confront whoever made that pseudo-snuff video serves as the narrative engine for a film that raises all kinds of prickly questions about “freedom of expression” and how far we’ll go to protect it — or, more to the point, in which circumstances we might be grateful for guardrails.

Daisy doesn’t have that luxury. Her job is to parse tickets all day (extreme material flagged by users for review), removing hate speech, spam and graphic content. Unless, of course, it’s in the legitimate public interest, like a news report or educational video. Gray areas abound. “I’m just afraid of what will pop up next,” she admits in an early scene that (blessedly) spares us the visuals, proving plenty upsetting by using audio alone to suggest the range of twisted footage her team is obliged to watch all day.

At one point, Matthew Nemeth’s screenplay gives us a provocative “what would you do?” test, cycling through a series of ticketed clips in which audiences have just seconds to decide whether to approve or delete, based only on their titles. “American Sweatshop” mostly succeeds in opening our eyes without being explicit, using inventive storytelling strategies to convey the toll this poisonous diet takes on Daisy and her peers.

There’s the tranquility room, where employees go when they need to cool down; the bad-taste bets as to who’s going to snap first (smart money’s on the new guy, played by Jeremy Ang Jones); the staff meetings, in which their clinical-minded manager (Christiane Paul) outlines the often-blurry boundaries between protecting their users and protecting the First Amendment. “Remember, we’re not censors. We are moderators,” she says in a cold German accent (the film’s female director and half its producers are German, though the drama is set in Tallahassee).

Most revealing are the whispered conversations between colleagues. Everybody complains about work, but not everybody has the kind of desk job where the contents of their screen would get a movie about their life slapped with an X rating. “We watch this shit so no one else has to,” Daisy tells one colleague (in what sounds an awful lot like this critic’s mantra). A smart scene in which she babysits her neighbor’s kid underscores why that matters: Minors can’t be trusted to know their own limits.

Who hasn’t been exposed to things they wish they could unsee online? While “American Sweatshop” gets us thinking about who filters the content that finds its way to our eyeballs, the film’s tension — what makes it more of a psychological thriller than a straightforward drama — comes from trying to guess which of its ever-fluctuating ensemble of sleaze-saturated guardians will go postal. A hothead named Bob (Joel Fry) has regular outbursts, whereas Daisy deals with the pressure in different ways. It makes her dating life difficult, though she needs the job, which is putting her through nursing school. By her own logic, both gigs are making the world a better place.

Reinhart’s a great choice for the lead role, in that she not only represents a generation that grew up entirely online, but also embodies the tough, can-take-care-of-herself attitude that could presumably handle such a job … at least for a time. Her character works in a modern Florida office park, where the man-made lake just outside the building comes stocked with alligators (a recurring metaphor for social media, which people tend to think of as safe, despite the threats lurking beneath the surface).

One could argue that “American Sweatshop” would be a stronger film without Daisy’s personal crusade to deal with the boundary-pushing fetish video that pushed her over the edge. But then it would just be a think piece about who polices the internet — whereas the vigilante version makes it hard to look away.