We Had to Remove This Post: Hyped Book Not Worth It

Posted On November 23, 2023

Hi Readers! Read another short book. But did not like this one at all. It had perhaps only two redeeming qualities, but other than that, a complete waste of time. I feel really sad when a book has a solid foundation and reading the blurb gets you excited but when you actually read the book, it doesn’t match to the premise. You might have seen this book recommended on Booktok and Bookstagram. Once more the hype was not for me.

Trigger Warnings: EVERYTHING! Death, Self-harm, suicide, mutilation, antisemitism, racial slurs, homophobia, animal death, animal cruelty, sexual assault, violence, abuse.

~~GOODREADS DESCRIPTION~~

For readers of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny or Ling Ma’s Severance: a tight, propulsive, chilling novel by a rising international star about a group of young colleagues working as social media content monitors—reviewers of violent or illegal videos for an unnamed megacorporation—who convince themselves they’re in control . . . until the violence strikes closer to home.

Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding 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 terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments. Yet Kayleigh finds a group of friends, even a new love—and, somehow, the job starts to feel okay.

But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they’re meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She’s still totally fine, though—or is she?

~~THOUGHTS~~

“I just don’t feel like a person anymore.”

The title ‘We Had to Remove This Post’ carries way more intrigue than the book itself. Naturally I had high expectations given the book title and the blurb, but it was all a disappointing ride overall. The protagonist Kayleigh works as a social media content moderator and has to see traumatizing things every day where she works at Hexa. The inhumanity of her job is conveyed within the first ten pages to grasp the reader’s attention, after which the story starts wandering to meaninglessness. Suddenly, you are more than halfway through the book reading about her relationships with Barbara and Yena and then her Hexa colleague Sigrid and the hamster Archibalt she had as a child.

The reader did not pick this book to read about toxic relationships which are written very poorly, so what’s the catch here? I don’t have a big ask. I certainly don’t want more details about the violent content. But how about a little insight into how it affected their mental health? How about her colleagues talking about their shifted worldview about what is allowed and not allowed instead of reading about them hanging out, drinking, smoking and making out? How about more real conversations with her counsellor Dr. Ana? Why so much irrelevance when there was such a high scope to make it a genre-defying novel?

We do read about Sigrid’s change in behaviour because of her work. We see her being unable to cope after reading about Nono, we see her questioning things and we see her breakdown all in the span of 10 pages, when that should have been the entirety of the novel. Aside from this, the book also subtly talks about how watching the same kind of content repeatedly can make you question global events that are actual facts, such as Earth being round and the Holocaust. It highlighted how the consumption of this constant content can be so jarring that it feeds on the minds of the gullible in an extremely negative way and they end up losing all perspective.

As for the ending, it was entirely unhinged. What would have been more of a shocking ending is them getting a video of one of them being abusive or causing self-harm. Would they still be able to follow the rule about leaving it up or taking it down? Or would they actually think about this person, this friend on a human level? The fact that this book made no dark impact on most readers also hints at the premise of this book about us being desensitized by reading a lot more dark content, which I think was plausible and ingenious. I have rated We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault at 2/5 stars!

Until next time,