We Had To Remove This Post

De: Hanna Bervoets, Emma Rault - translator

Narrado por: Khristine Hvam

'The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions . . . superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle' - Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
'A glimpse of the foetid underbelly of the internet' - The Times

We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets is a chilling, powerful and gripping story about who or what determines our world view.

To be a content moderator is to see humanity at its worst — but Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job working for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed.

Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens. Yet Kayleigh is good at her job, and in her colleagues she finds a group of friends, even a new girlfriend — and for the first time in her life, Kayleigh’s future seems bright.

But soon the job seems to change them all, shifting their worlds in alarming ways. How long before the moderators own morals bend and flex under the weight of what they see?

Examining the toxic world of content moderation, the novel forces us to ask: what is right? What is normal? And who gets to decide?

Translated from the original Dutch by Emma Rault.

'Taut as a thriller, sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka' - Irish Times
'Fast paced and thrilling, violent and nightmarish' - Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
'An acid glimpse into a new form of labor existing today' - Ling Ma, author of Severance

Reseñas de la Crítica

Acid-dipped novella . . . a glimpse of the foetid underbelly of the internet and a sobering consideration of who is deciding what we see, and at what cost. (Siobhan Murphy)

A chilling page-turner . . . the unreliable narrator gives it a strong literary heartbeat — and it’s richly suspenseful too. With a few deft strokes [Bervoets] manages to incorporate all of the ills of social media into one concise story . . . utterly haunting. (Johanna Thomas-Corr)

The setting alone is compelling and has always been in need of an accomplished novelist’s attention . . . The dreamlike climax of the final pages is beautifully wrought. Men might usefully confront in Bervoets a writerly intelligence at once so tender and so willing to look into the abyss. (Ian McEwan)

Bervoets' neat dissection of morality is as taut as a thriller, sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka. (Catherine Taylor)

Surprising and enigmatic . . . intriguing and frustrating . . . As we spend more and more time in the trickmirror of the internet, how can we know what or whom to believe? (Laura van den Berg)

A very modern tale about the dark side of the internet.

Hanna Bervoet's slim, compelling novel We Had to Remove This Post addresses the foetid morass of social media . . . Bevoets is often acidly funny, especially when demonstraring the workers' mordant, jockish humour.

The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions . . . Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. (Ian McEwan, author of Atonement)

Extremely gripping and intense edgy queer novel (Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl)

This novel gives us an acid glimpse into a new form of labor existing today, a job that extracts an immeasurable psychic toll. Fascinating and disturbing. (Ling Ma, author of Severance)

An astonishing and compelling cast of characters, drawn together through circumstance, separated by the same. The novel is fast paced and thrilling, violent and nightmarish and grief-stricken, but also tender and wildly moving. (Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth)

I thought it was incredible and has real cult potential. (Alice Slater)

Powerful, discussable, and a harbinger of a voice-in-translation to watch.

Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IR . . . Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.

Magnetic . . . Bervoets frames the story like a mystery, slowly revealing the fractured relationships and circumstances that drove Kayleigh away from her job.

A metonym for online disconnection

This story is a surprisingly subtle metonym for online disconnection, with romantic and friend relationships standing as miniature forms of all of our estranged, bamboozled uncertainty about how well we know others online.

I was impressed by how it eases out into that sense of online disconnection generally, almost enough to make one forget the initial premise of traumatised content moderators, until it circled back, tonally, to that as a root of all the other uncertainty.

I only have two dissatisfactions.
One is that the story itself is a bit too subtle and inconclusive, relying a bit too much on the feeling of frustration and lack of resolution. I can respect those as the difficult feelings Hannah Bervoets was aiming to evoke, but it feels overdone: a little more explicit point-making might not have hurt.

The other is that the book was intended to come with an appendix of sources for further reading, but doesn’t. The narration makes it clear that this is supposed to be available as a supplement, and Audible normally includes supplemental pdfs in cases like these, but there was nothing attached.
That needs to be fixed.