We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

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 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.

This book had so much potential. I loved the premise and the idea of it. It started off very promising and I was invested quick. The format of her writing a letter to a lawyer because a lawsuit is happening kinda confused me and then it didn't end up having any payoff either. Which is a theme in the reading of this novella.

Nothing has any fucking pay-off. She constantly keeps referring to a thing she did that is like crazy or something so shocking that is about to happen and then it's the most bland thing. The characters were largely unrelatable. Halfway through the book, I was so invested in what happens to them but most of the side characters are ignored in the ending. None of the crazy things they start to believe are led anywhere. I guess it just ends with all those people believing all these conspiracies and there is no payoff to that either.

This could have been so good if it dug a little deeper and focussed on all the characters and how they got into and perhaps out of these rabbit holes but it fully ignored that as if it didn't just spend half the book setting it up. Could have been great, I did enjoy reading it but the more I think about it the more I hate it.

an exceptionally written story that doesn't always fit its format. i feel like i'll remember the parts that turned my stomach more than anything.

weird nonsense filled book, i hate that ending

i expected soooo much more

An uneasy dark dive into the impacts of dissociation. The protagonist is the last person to be aware of how the violence in the systems she inhabits has permeated her behaviour. Powerful.