The Bots (2020)

The Bots is a series of video installations based on interviews with internet content moderators conducted with journalist Adrian Chen during a year-long investigation. These moderators are employees of large online platforms who review and remove content that does not meet platform guidelines. In The Bots, Actors reenact these testimonies from home, filming themselves on their phones. Each video is mounted on the back of a customised office desk identical to those used at Facebook’s Berlin moderation centre, where the interviewees worked. The artists adopt the format of “fake makeup tutorials,” a tactic used online to evade censorship. Discussions of violence, sexual abuse, hate speech, and terrorism are interwoven with makeup tips, linking cosmetic concealment to the sanitising labour of moderation.