We Had To Remove This Post

By Hanna Bervoets

Does what you see change who you are?

‘A superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling’ - Ian McEwan, author of Atonement

Kayleigh is broke. Out of options, she takes a job as a content moderator, reviewing horrors and hate online and deciding which posts needs to be removed. Kayleigh is good at her job, and in her colleagues she finds a group of friends, even a new girlfriend. For the first time in her life, the future seems bright . . . But soon the job begins to shift Kayleigh’s world in alarming ways. In the glare of the screen, how long can Kayleigh hold on to her humanity?

Hanna Bervoets' stunning novel We Had To Remove This Post is translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault.

‘This novel gives us an acid glimpse into a new form of labor existing today . . . Fascinating and disturbing’ - Ling Ma, author of Severance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: May 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781529087253

Hanna Bervoets

HANNA BERVOETS is the author of seven novels in her home country of the Netherlands, and she has also written screenplays, plays, short stories, and essays. She is the recipient of the prestigious Frans Kellendonk Prize for her entire body of works. She was a resident at Art Omi: Writers at Ledig House, New York, and her fiction has been translated into German, French, and Turkish. She works and lives in Amsterdam with her girlfriend and two guinea pigs. We Had to Remove This Post is her first book to be translated into English.

Reviews for We Had To Remove This Post

[Ashley · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Absolute bullsh!t. I'd give it zero if I could, don't waste your time.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wat wij zagen is a tiny novel. Commissioned to be distributed for free, the annual Book Week free novel has about 92 pages.At first, the short novel seems to be conceived as creative non-fiction. It is written as an autobiographical report or a letter, describing the work at a large unnamed social media company (most likely Youtube or Facebook).The main characters in the novel are content moderators, and their job is to evaluate (un)acceptable content, ranging from very violent content, sexually explicit content, forms of abuse, dangerous experiments and suicide.However, this setting is the background to the story. The main theme is a love story which develops between two women in the team. There is quite some tension between these two themes, that are not very well connected. Neither is fully developed within the short scope of the novel.

[mandarinenschaeler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

SPOILERS AHEAD!! that was a really nice short read, i really liked the shifting perception of our main character of what is wrong or not and i do catch myself thinking about the rape reveal quite often but overall i just wish there was more. i dont even know what kind of more, more to read? more to it? worth the read tho and the cover is stunning

[psalva-706031 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was brutal. It was, to me, a study in the extremes of PTSD from work environments. It was twisted, dark, and haunting, but grounded in the reality of social media moderators. Trigger warnings for just about everything. The writing was intense but this was a page turner, so I will be looking for the author‘s other work to be translated into English.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bervoets takes us into the scary world of the content moderators, the overworked, underpaid heroes whose job it is to protect the reputations of social media companies us users from all the nastiness lurking out there on the internet. Her narrator, Kayleigh, has tried to pay off her debts by taking a job with an agency that does content moderation for a big social media company. She tells us about all the routine unpleasantness of that kind of work — long shifts, demanding targets, paranoid security rules, arcane guidelines that change from day to day about what is and is not "acceptable". And gradually we get to see what constant exposure to images of violence, pornography, conspiracy theories, fake news, and all the rest of it does to the people who have to work with it. The sight of a workman on the roof of a nearby building leads the whole office to jump to the conclusion that there's a suicide attempt going on. Co-workers start believing flat-earth theories or holocaust deniers. Kayleigh's girlfriend Sigrid gets nightmares after learning about the suicide of a girl whose self-harm video she had previously vetted as being "within the rules". And Kayleigh herself starts, without noticing it, to behave in ways that shock her when Sigrid points them out to her after the event.This kind of book always seems to run into the problem of finding a good balance between journalism and fiction, and I had the feeling that Bervoets was squeezing just a bit too much information into the tight format of the novella, so that the development of the characters suffered a little. But still a very interesting read.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets and translated by Emma Rault is a short but powerful novel that brings the societal and the personal into conversation with each other.The obvious societal commentary is about the types of things that, because of social media, seem to be proliferating. Violence, hatred, bestiality, and all combinations of those are posted. To try to make "the platform" a better forum it falls to human beings to monitor the posts and determine what can and can't stay online.Through the narrator, Kayleigh, we watch both the stress that type of work has on people and the extent to which even the least rational theories can gain a foothold when viewed and listened to enough, even when your job is to remove objectionable material. Though Kayleigh feels she is holding up well, it is through her story that we see the deeper personal aspect.As Kayleigh, and by extension any human, sees more and more extreme acts and ideas she becomes normalized to it such that what had been satisfying is no longer. So how does one, or can one, maintain their own moral and ethical standards when bombarded with the ugliness that seems to pervade so much of social media?I would recommend this to anyone who likes to view the problems facing society through a fictional frame that allows for both empathy and consternation. Everything is presented for the reader to make sense of what happened but the reader must do some of the work rather than expect explanations for everything. If you're willing to do that work you will be rewarded. If you really feel you must "like" the characters then you may have some trouble, these are people with flaws and those flaws make the story, so "liking" has nothing to do with it. Either you can empathize with people or you can't.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.