We Had To Remove This Post

by Hanna Bervoets

Overview

WHAT IS “NORMAL”?

WHAT IS “RIGHT”?

AND WHO GETS TO DECIDE?

To be a content moderator is to see humanity at its worst—but Kayleigh needs money. So she takes a job working for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her task: review offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and decide which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing moderating guidelines. Yet Kayleigh is good at her job, and she finds in her colleagues a group of friends—even a new girlfriend—and for the first time in her life, her future seems bright.

But soon the job seems to change them all, shifting their worlds in alarming ways. How long before the moderators’ own senses of right and wrong begin to bend and flex?

From one of the most acclaimed Dutch writers of her generation, We Had to Remove This Post is a chilling, powerful, and urgent literary masterpiece about who or what determines our worldview, who sets the boundaries, and just how much a person can be asked to accept.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358622369
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	62,241
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

01/17/2022

Bervoet’s fleeting yet magnetic English-language debut offers a glimpse into the world of social media content moderators. Kayleigh, in need of cash to pay off credit card debt, takes a job at Hexa, a subcontractor for an unnamed video platform. Along with a ragtag team, she spends her days watching disturbing videos and flagging those that break the platform’s guidelines. While adjusting to the job, she meets Sigrid, a fellow moderator, and the pair start dating, but as weeks pass, exposure to thousands of horrifying videos—among them graphically described clips of self-harm, animal abuse, and praise of the Holocaust—takes its toll, pushing some moderators to their mental edges and inspiring others to subscribe to “flat Earther” conspiracy theories. After Kayleigh quits, a lawyer hounds her to join a lawsuit against the platform along with other former employees, and Bervoets frames the story like a mystery, slowly revealing the fractured relationships and circumstances that drove Kayleigh away from her job. Whether carefully dissecting ever-evolving corporate rules or chronicling a night at the bar with her workmates (“we pour our leftovers into each other’s half-empty glasses”), Kayleigh is an engaging narrator. The story is brief, but it packs a wallop. Agent: Lisette Verhagen, PFD Literary. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions, have become, our shared affliction. It needed an accomplished novelist to explore humanely the damage. Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. At its wonderful, hallucinatory climax, Kayleigh, the shattered protagonist, asks on our behalf the one true question, and the spellbound reader will usefully struggle for an answer." — Ian McEwan

“Powerful, discussable, and a harbinger of a voice-in-translation to watch.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IRL… Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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

“We Had To Remove This Post is one of the most fascinating books I've read in years. Hanna Bervoets has created 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. A brilliant peek behind the curtains at what happens when we put our trust in social media. Believe me when I say you've never read anything like it."  — Kristen Arnett, New York Times-bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth

“Rarely does this novel read like correspondence. The prose is too fine, the settings too detailed, the pacing exquisite." — New York Journal of Books

"We Had to Remove This Post is a discomfiting mystery about the disturbing parts of social media that most people never see."
— New York Times

From the Publisher

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

Booklist (starred review)

We Had To Remove This Post is one of the most fascinating books I've read in years. Hanna Bervoets has created 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. A brilliant peek behind the curtains at what happens when we put our trust in social media. Believe me when I say you've never read anything like it." 

Kristen Arnett

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

"The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions, have become, our shared affliction. It needed an accomplished novelist to explore humanely the damage. Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. At its wonderful, hallucinatory climax, Kayleigh, the shattered protagonist, asks on our behalf the one true question, and the spellbound reader will usefully struggle for an answer."

Ian McEwan

★ 2022-01-26
Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IRL.

Up until 16 months ago, Kayleigh was a content moderator at Hexa, a company contracted by an unnamed social media platform to review user posts for inappropriate content. Kayleigh and her co-workers must view hundreds of disturbing posts and videos per day and accurately categorize and flag videos for removal according to company guidelines. The guidelines are often counterintuitive, with more attention to preventing litigation than preventing harm. As Kayleigh and her co-workers begin to internalize the horrors they see each day, the line between the virtual and the physical world, truth and bot chatter, grows fuzzy. Co-workers mistake a roof repairman for a jumper, try to contact users who livestream self-harm, and join flat-earther cults. In this twist on the workplace drama, Bervoets masterfully captures our contemporary moment without devolving into national politics or soapbox rhetoric. Think Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation but with characters who have aged a few years and started full-time jobs. The psychological toll inherent to today’s workforce, big tech ethics, and viral misinformation—each are examined in turn by Kayleigh’s wonderfully snarky, unreliable narration and Bervoets’ intimate portrayals of a well-imagined and diverse cast of characters. Look out for a sucker-punch ending as Kayleigh searches for one of her flagged influencers in person. At first it’s infuriating—over-the-top, out of character, and abrupt. But on further consideration, this controversial conclusion has the reader experience Kayleigh's emotional process after reviewing each post: shocked back into reality and left to wonder how to live with what she's seen.

Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.

Kirkus Reviews