Hanna Bervoets has richly obliged in this superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle novel of mental unravelling. It needed an accomplished novelist to explore humanely the damage. 'The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions, have become, our shared affliction. How long before the moderators' own senses of right and wrong begin to bend and flex?įrom 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. 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.īut soon the job seems to change them all, shifting their worlds in alarming ways. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform's ever-changing moderating guidelines. Her task: review offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and decide which need to be removed. So she takes a job working for a social media platform whose name she isn't allowed to mention.

To be a content moderator is to see humanity at its worst-but Kayleigh needs money.

About the Book 'Originally published in the Netherlands in 2021 by Stichting Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek.'-Title page verso.

We had to remove this post hanna