I downloaded this novella on NetGalley, and found it to be a difficult read. On the one hand, the author clearly wants to show the impacts of secondary trauma on her narrator, but on the other the sense of disconnection the narrator has to display in order to successfully convey the impact acts as a barrier to sympathising with her.

For me, the first 90% worked quite well - we can see how moderating violent social media posts takes a toll on the mental health of the moderators. Relationships fall apart. The narrator's response to her girlfriend's saying she is coercive in her behaviour is to apply their workplace policies, which, it's clear to us, allow terrible videos to stay online. Her sense of societal norms has shifted.

So far, so good. Then there's a final scene that feels like an incomplete fragment. We're left with the image of her having broken into someone else's house and they are arriving home. What happens next? Who knows? It's not intriguing, it's just extremely odd.

Three Word review: What actually happened?

Look, this book is a difficult read. It deals with a lot of topics that are hard to stomach, but I felt they were written well.

The translation of this book from Dutch was pretty seemless, and it never felt like a strangely or mistranslated read.

I loved seeing the relationship between the co workers, who all pretty much had to lift each others spirits, and wish that had been focused on a little more.

Dark, nightmarish and unsettling, a book certainly not for the faint-hearted. For such a short novel, this certainly packs a mega punch.

I thought the blurb was better than the book.
I know I’m being harsh but I feel I’ve been mislead.

I was all eager and pumped up to read this after checking out the blurb. So that lies where my disappointment started I think.

Kayleigh needed a job.
Her new job was to monitor the content on social media.

I’ve often wondered how and who does this job and with the research the author put in, I have become aware of how it might be done.
There is no doubt that there were and are some horrific things on social media and thank goodness for the ones we don’t see, this got me thinking about the awful things we DO see.

There’s a romance in here.
That tended to take over halfway through the book I thought, only so much you can say about her job.

Social media for me has brought good things and if we think deep, some bad and shady stuff.
It’s also taken over our lives without thinking about it and this got me thinking…..
Some peoples lives live around the Internet. And it’s brought less interaction and “real” friendships and socialising for some.

Then for those housebound, it can be a window to your world.

Makes you think.

It needed to delve deeper around the sordid postings.

3.75

A novella that really made me think. This isn't a story about the depravities that you can see online, but more about how it affects the people who have to moderate that content, as it should be. I thought the ending perfectly wrapped up a well constructed novella. I talk about this book in our mid year favourites episode of <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/1116755/11006580">The Bookcast Club</a>.

I did not finish this book. However, I decided to rate what I did read because it wasn't the book's fault I decided to cut my reading short. In fact, I think We Had To Remove This Post was too poignant, too raw, and perhaps a bit too close for comfort. The fact this was putting me in a glum mood is in itself a statement to the interesting theme and very personal writing.

I am always interested in books that are a little experimental or that have something unique to say on the way that we live. Translated from Dutch by Emma Rault, that’s exactly what this tiny little slip of a book promised but I’m afraid that I think my expectations were slightly too high.

Kayleigh needs money, which is why she takes the job as a content moderator at a social media giant. Her job is to review violent and disturbing content and decide whether to remove it, all while being watched and assessed by the company itself. But the job gives her a set of new friends and even a girlfriend, Sigrid and it doesn’t seem such a bad thing. However, the pressure and nature of their work eventually takes its toll on her co-workers, changing their thought patterns and behaviours to reflect the very horrors that they’re tasked with deleting.

The book touches on the hypocrisy that is rife on the internet. The rules for what content is allowed and what isn’t appears so random at times and of course, there are far more rules for women and minorities than there are for straight, white men. It’s an issue that many people have tried to rally against for years and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to show any signs of changing.

One of the scariest things that this book reminded me of is that the awful behaviour displayed in the content that Kayleigh reviews is carried out by real people. The people in the videos are real humans and these events really happened. With that knowledge, I can see how deeply affecting watching this kind of content all day every day can severely disturb anyone, let alone someone who is already disturbed. I think this was the message that the author was trying to send -that harmful online content can have a very real, very damaging effect on anyone who views it.

We Had To Remove This Post was an interesting read but it ended far too quickly and abruptly for me. I even wondered if my copy was missing a chapter or two because I was just cut off right in the middle of an intensely dark scene. Sadly, I think my confusion at being dropped so unexpectedly took away some of the impact that I was supposed to get from the ending but I still enjoyed the drama and social commentary that the book provided.

A short, sharp and dark novel that could easily be read in one sitting. This book is complex and character driven, and focuses on many issues that are relevant today - self harm, sexual abuse, social media.

It is fast paced and unpredictable. A must read in 2022.

4.5 rounded up.

A short, sharp novella exploring the shocking (and all too real) experience of content moderators who analyse potentially harmful content online. Punchy and thought-provoking.

This book did absolutely nothing for me. I understood the premise to be a really interesting one given the social media age we are living in but this book focused on a shock factor that doesn’t land (probably given the things I have in fact seen on social media). While I deeply hate the things content moderators on social media have to experience, the author made all of the characters very bland or dislikable. The effects of subtle radicalisation were not dwelled on enough and the ending was impossible for me to accept as a solid end of a book.

I know people write trigger warnings nowadays, but I can’t think of one single one. Assume the worst, it’s in the book.

The story of a group of content moderators. They look at videos and content and determine what should be taken down and what should be not. Sends you occasional mini-shocks as you read. Also reminded me of a story by Nisha Susan in The women who forgot to invent facebook which explored the life of content moderators.

3.5 stars.

This was an interesting read. I wasn't sure what to make of it once I finished reading it but after thinking about it, I liked it more. It's sad that I never considered the awful stuff social media moderators have to see when we report anything and this book covers what they go through. How it affects them and their personal life. How it numbs them. It's dark, it's a little creepy but insightful.
I did find that the first half of the book was different to the second half, as the first half covers the job and the horrors they have to see. The second, it's more about the relationships between the protagonist, her colleagues and girlfriend. I wish we got more time with them so they could be fleshed out more and see more of a shift in their personality, but I did enjoy it. It's short, it's a little weird, but it's worth a read.
Very thought-provoking.

A compelling novel exploring the narrator's experiences as a moderator for an unnamed social media site and the horrifying things she sees - similar to other "social media fiction" novels like Impostor Syndrome by Kathy Wang or Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. But this is a bit of a "nothing happens" book if you don't enjoy books without much plot!

We Had To Remove This Post is a phenomenal dark, thought-provoking read. The story is gripping and addictive exploring the world of content moderation in a way we haven't seen before. When Kayleigh is desperate for cash, she takes a job doing content moderation for a social media site. You have to think - these are the people who see what the site would deem inappropriate or wrong for their users to see - what do they have to subject themselves to on a regular basis? And when the decision-making comes in, how is that decided as to what's appropriate or normal? It feels like a slippery slope. This is a dark story that will truly make readers think. It's an outstanding read. Highly recommended!!

We Had to Remove This Post is one of those books that leaves me thinking…well, not much beyond: this is a thing that exists

It doesn’t happen all that much but now and again I read books that spectacularly fail to elicit any discernible feeling or emotion in me (beyond ‘meh’). This is ironic given that We Had to Remove This Post is exactly the kind of wannabe-conversation-starter book that tackles topical & important issues. Maybe someone who knows very little about the gruelling realities of being a social media content moderator may find We Had to Remove This Post to be insightful in a way that I was sadly unable to. Having already come across articles and actual interviews about this topic, well, I was expecting something a bit more evocative and nuanced. But this novella was a fairly banal affair. Sure, the characters have arguments, or they are confronted with the worst that humanity has to offer (videos/images of extremely graphic nature), but, I just could not bring myself to care or even really believe in them, let alone what they were arguing about.

I found the choice to have Kayleigh’s narration be a ‘confession’ of sorts to this guy, quite frankly gimmicky. Kayleigh gives us an idea of the kind of toxic work environment and emotionally draining workload, but she does so in broad strokes, so I never got a sense of who she was, let alone the kind of people her colleagues were. She becomes girlfriend with one of her colleagues, and their relationship is supposedly a central aspect of the narrative, but I found their dynamic and that final twisty reveal extremely derivative.
Eventually, some of the content moderators begin endorsing the kind of material they should be taking down, and the narrative shows how easily misinformation is spread on social media, and how long exposure to certain spheres of the internet may eventually lead someone to 'convert' to that line of thinking/way of life.

I couldn’t tell you much else about this book, given how little of an impression it made on me. This is very much a book that could have easily been an essay or an op-ed. The subject matters—social media, conspiracy theories, being a content moderator—take the centre stage, at the expense of a compelling storyline and rounded characters. It wasn't quite a I'm Making A Point type of book but there it wasn't that far off...

The writing was okay, nothing to write home about. In the latter half of the book were some attempts at the kind of atmosphere you would find in a psychological thriller and they did not stick the landing.
Anyway, YMMV so if you are interested in this book I recommend you read more positive reviews.

Hanna Bervoets 'We Had To Remove This Post' is a blistering indictment of social media policy standards (or the lack of them!) and shines some much-needed light on the distinct unwillingness of leading companies to assume any degree of responsibility for the posts they host. Content moderation sounds like a call centre job forged in Hell. The book is compulsively readable, thought-provoking and enlightening and has much to say on the impact of repeated exposure to traumatising material online. It's a quick read too. I felt a little bemused/let down by the ending but overall, it's well worth a read. Kudos to Emma Rault for her excellent translation work.

Interesting read with a dark but relevant subject matter. It was easy to read and kept me engaged.
However the ending left me a little disappointed and confused

I thought this book was mostly great. Dark, disturbing, pacy, and asks questions about social media and the horrors that people are exposed to daily. However, I found the ending abrupt and arbitrary, and it let the book down for me.

This was a very interesting premise with the capacity to become very dark and potential to have taken a more
Horror-driven route. The focus on the characters psychology and relationships gives the book depth. As a horror fan I would’ve liked the book to have delved deeper into the kind of disturbing content that the characters had to witness and I would’ve liked their response to be a bit more fleshed out. Overall this was an interesting, fast-paced, and unique short read that is very relevant to this digital age.

A thought provoking book about who are the real people employed by social media companies to monitor content online.
How do you decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't? How do the people having to watch/read the content in moderation cope with what they see?

While the questions are interesting I wasn't so convinced by the novel around these points and I don't think I quite understood what was happening and why.