We Had to Remove This Post

By: Hanna Bervoets, Emma Rault - translator

Narrated by: Khristine Hvam

Length: 2 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2022 HarperCollins Publishers (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Taut as a thriller, sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka." (Irish Times)

"A superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle." (Ian McEwan, author of Atonement)

"Fast paced and thrilling, violent and nightmarish and grief-stricken." (Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Thing)

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.