Lili Reinhart Reveals Playing a Content Moderator Has Changed Her Relationship with Social Media

Anyone familiar with the work of Luis Buñel or John Waters knows that shocking images are nothing new to cinema. But anyone who has been on the internet for more than a day also realizes that art and curated choices have nothing on the world wide web. So how does the film American Sweatshop, in which Riverdale star Lili Reinhart plays a content moderator, portray a video so shocking that it leaves her character Daisy visibly shaken? By emphasizing the human aspect.

“There’s a shot of my character’s eyes, with the image being burned into her brain and retinas,” Reinhart says while visiting the Den of Geek studio at SXSW. “It’s more interesting to see a video that’s traumatizing someone from a different point-of-view than just seeing it on a computer screen. You’re actually seeing how they’re processing it through their eyes.”

Written by Matthew Nemeth and directed by Uta Briesewitz, American Sweatshop follows social media moderator Daisy Moriarty, who at the fictional company of Paladin endures what might be the worst job on the planet: watching, reviewing, and debating whether flagged social media content that has offended someone should be deleted. And when she finds a video that seems to depict a real violent crime, the image becomes imprinted on her mind.

Like many, Reinhart admits she didn’t spend a lot of time considering the daily horrors an online content moderator would face: “I was vaguely familiar with content moderation, but then I found out that actually a friend of mine does that as a part-time job. People walk away feeling fascinated that this job exists, that people sit at a desk and watch videos that you’re not supposed to see, and the horrible effects it can have on their well-being and mental health…. It’s not a job that you have forever and I think a lot of people walk away from it due to the mental downside of watching disturbing videos all day long.”

That surreality of that human element also drove the creatives as they developed the film.

“A lot of the anecdotes in the film are based on real events,” Briesewitz tells us during the conversation. “Matthew Nemeth did research and used articles for the script, I did research and watched a documentary about content moderation called The Cleaners.” However, she also was wary of letting these sources override her own voice as a filmmaker. “I didn’t want to take it much further than that because I felt like I knew what the world was. I wanted to stay focused on our story as well. It gets set in motion at this office, but then there’s a whole other story to it where Daisy goes into the world and tries to do something.

Reinhart had a bit easier job maintaining that balance because she grew up on the internet and didn’t need to do much research to play someone disturbed by anonymous strangers’ posts.

“I grew up watching a lot of things that I shouldn’t have just from being exposed to the internet,” Reinhart admits. “I was on Reddit way too young, saw things on there that a 13-year-old girl shouldn’t see, or no one should see, to be honest. I think we all have that kind of a story and we all have a video or an image or something that we’ve seen that stuck with us, which is sad, but kind of the whole point of the film.” 

For both filmmakers, the process of making the film was a reminder for how the innovation of hte internet has seemingly corresponded with folks feeling more isolated and detached from their world.

“Social media has given us permission to get away with not having human connection,” Reinhart observes. “You can go a whole day without talking to someone in-person because you have connection online. Not that online is a false sense of community, but it’s very different from having an actual community. Culture has shifted where you feel this false sense of closeness because you’re friends with people on Facebook and Instagram, thinking you don’t need to see them in-person anymore because we can just DM every now and then.”

Even though she’s never been much of a social media user, director Briesewitz’s experience of making American Sweatshop has changed even how she interacts with the internet.

“The movie reminded me that we can’t really rely on anybody policing the internet in a right way,” the helmer says. While art can use disturbing images to create a story or a point, the choices are are handled with discretion. Consider the aforementioned image of something being burned into Reinhart’s eyes in one scene. To Briesewitz it would have “been easy for us to make our point by choosing the horrible videos that we are commenting on. I didn’t want people to go and see the movie and think, ‘I wish I’d had a warning that I would watch a beheading, because now I can’t unsee it.’ If we just hinted at the videos via title or just the sound, people will fill in their own horrors.”

It’s the difference between suggesting trauma and inflicting it, which is a very thin line to rely on a small office of entry-level workers to navigate for us. That line has also become sharper and more defined in the mind’s eye of American Sweatshop‘s star.

“I’ve tried to just limit the exposure I have to socials in general,” says Reinhart. “I am trying to make sure what I’m engaging with is positive content and not horrific. [And] the movie has encouraged me to want to connect with my real-world rather than try and rely on social to be connected with human beings. I’d rather keep the in-person connection alive than foster or cater to an online relationship.”

American Sweatshop premiered at SXSW on March 8.

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