We Had to Remove This Post - by Hanna Bervoets

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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