Hanna Bervoets

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets and translated by Emma Rault is a short but powerful novel that brings the societal and the personal into conversation with each other.

The obvious societal commentary is about the types of things that, because of social media, seem to be proliferating. Violence, hatred, bestiality, and all combinations of those are posted. To try to make "the platform" a better forum it falls to human beings to monitor the posts and determine what can and can't show more stay online.

Through the narrator, Kayleigh, we watch both the stress that type of work has on people and the extent to which even the least rational theories can gain a foothold when viewed and listened to enough, even when your job is to remove objectionable material. Though Kayleigh feels she is holding up well, it is through her story that we see the deeper personal aspect.

As Kayleigh, and by extension any human, sees more and more extreme acts and ideas she becomes normalized to it such that what had been satisfying is no longer. So how does one, or can one, maintain their own moral and ethical standards when bombarded with the ugliness that seems to pervade so much of social media?

I would recommend this to anyone who likes to view the problems facing society through a fictional frame that allows for both empathy and consternation. Everything is presented for the reader to make sense of what happened but the reader must do some of the work rather than expect explanations for everything. If you're willing to do that work you will be rewarded. If you really feel you must "like" the characters then you may have some trouble, these are people with flaws and those flaws make the story, so "liking" has nothing to do with it. Either you can empathize with people or you can't.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

Bervoets takes us into the scary world of the content moderators, the overworked, underpaid heroes whose job it is to protect the reputations of social media companies us users from all the nastiness lurking out there on the internet.

Her narrator, Kayleigh, has tried to pay off her debts by taking a job with an agency that does content moderation for a big social media company. She tells us about all the routine unpleasantness of that kind of work — long shifts, demanding targets, show more paranoid security rules, arcane guidelines that change from day to day about what is and is not "acceptable". And gradually we get to see what constant exposure to images of violence, pornography, conspiracy theories, fake news, and all the rest of it does to the people who have to work with it. The sight of a workman on the roof of a nearby building leads the whole office to jump to the conclusion that there's a suicide attempt going on. Co-workers start believing flat-earth theories or holocaust deniers. Kayleigh's girlfriend Sigrid gets nightmares after learning about the suicide of a girl whose self-harm video she had previously vetted as being "within the rules". And Kayleigh herself starts, without noticing it, to behave in ways that shock her when Sigrid points them out to her after the event.

This kind of book always seems to run into the problem of finding a good balance between journalism and fiction, and I had the feeling that Bervoets was squeezing just a bit too much information into the tight format of the novella, so that the development of the characters suffered a little. But still a very interesting read. show less

So, I used to watch gore. A lot of it. It was an addiction: part of the DNA of my PTSD. I needed a way to numb myself from the constant, white, electric pain within and around myself. It took a year or so, but I eventually found that release through other things. (Mainly just looking at pictures of scary bugs. Not joking.)

This book is a harrowing and uncomfortable look at what the internet has allowed us to become privy to. In another century, I would not have had that release. I would have show more probably drunk and hurt myself far worse—two terrible things for the body that I can't pretend would have necessarily been better than watching suicides on loop. But it makes you think, doesn't it?

Following a woman working at a content moderation center, this book charts the mental disintegration of being at the frontlines of this work, and how the internet poisons and hardens the worst of us. It's provocative and funny and driving in a way that lends itself to a one-sit read, and finishing that last page leaves you feeling so, so icky. It was bold. I liked that.

Bervoets has a contemporary and loose style to her writing that makes the book terribly easy to rip through in one sitting. The book's strength is in its short length and its weakness is in the relatively strict narrative reality it keeps. This latter aspect makes sense: the author wants to highlight the unreliable narrator and remind us that we can all be privy to massive blindspots in our world from the slick constant content of social media. But. Certain aspects of the main character (namely, her reticence at sharing emotions from the beginning until the end) are ultimately placed without greater meaning, and the lack of experimentation of prose left me feeling as if I'd read a good book but not a great book, you know? But I still really enjoyed this and found it questioning all the right parts of a strange, horrifying frontier of the internet age. show less

A one-sitter, which has been nice seeing as I had been in somewhat of a slump for a while there. This is, as I described on twitter, a nasty little book about freaks doing weird shit — which, I’m coming to realise, is my favourite genre of literary fiction. The novel navigates heavy, disturbing topics (violence, trauma, the cruelties we inflict upon one another) with an almost jovial lightness, heightening the tension as characters seem to become more and more detached from reality.

A show more short, sharp, shock of a book. show less