27. Wild Card: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

List Progress: 11/30

On any social media site, or truly any website that accepts user submissions, there is a team of people working behind the scenes to keep some basic rules in place. The anonymity and sheer volume of the internet can bring out the worst in people, and professional content moderators spend their days wading through hate speech, pornography, spam, abuse and violence. Moderation cannot and should not be left entirely to machines and algorithms, but what about the impact on the moderators themselves? We Had to Remove This Post, the 2021 novel by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets, follows one such moderator, Kayleigh, as she reflects on what working at the moderating company Hexa did to her, her friends, and her relationships. It is a bracing, disturbing, sometimes unpleasant read, and if the book were much longer than its novella length, it would be too much. But for a story about the very concept of “too much”, this book is just the right amount.

We Had to Remove This Post is framed as Kayleigh’s tell-all, her interview with a lawyer to explain why she won’t join her former coworkers’ lawsuit against Hexa for unsafe work environments. Kayleigh knows that working at Hexa damaged her, but she also sees her own actions as shameful enough that she won’t publicly take a stand against them. Because Kayleigh started a relationship with her coworker Sigrid fairly soon into her tenure at the company, and with the combination of a toxic relationship dynamic and the trash they pumped into their brains every day, they brought out the absolute worst in each other. Sigrid starts to see the appeal of the conspiracy-theory videos they have to watch for content violations, and Kayleigh starts to crave the rush and revulsion of seeing incredibly depraved acts in a constant stream. They both think they are handling things better than the other and don’t see the rabbit holes they’ve gone down. Their whole job as moderators is to evaluate things from the outside, so of course they are better at that than the introspection to see their own actions. It’s a canny dynamic that Bervoets sets up, one that is easy to get sucked into.

This book is not for the faint of heart. Slurs, hate-speech, racism, descriptions of violence, self-harm, animal abuse and child abuse are all to be found in this short page count, and no one would be wrong to decide that it is too unpleasant of a matter to engage with in their media. But for everyone on the internet, there are people working day and night to make sure that you don’t have to engage with it, and Bervoets does powerful work highlighting that. While Remove this Post is a work of fiction, it is based explicitly on several real sources, including lawsuits that content moderators have brought against companies like Facebook. It’s a rough job, and someone does have to do it, but those people deserve all the support they can get.

Would I Recommend It: Yes, with the large caveat that the reader be comfortable with the content mentioned above.