A review by librovermo
We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

4.5

When I learned this is a book about a woman who works as a content moderator for a large social media platform and how she copes with the graphic content she encounters, I knew I had to read it.

Many years ago, I worked for a company contracted by Google not to moderate content, but to help guarantee that Google users receive results relevant to their searches. So if, for example, someone searched for “where to buy a computer,” I was part of the process that ensures the results that come up are appropriate for the query. In this example, the most helpful results would be electronics stores, websites that sell computers, etc., and not results like shoe stores or Olive Garden locations. A lot of the work I did was that simple. But there was also a much darker, very depressing side to it. People use Google to search for all kinds of messed up shit. I had to see not only the searches but the results and I sincerely wish I could forget some of those things.

The the first sentence, “So what kinds of things did you see?,” made me laugh out loud because this question is literally the reason I stopped telling people about that job. I wondered if I’d see myself in the rest of Kayleigh’s story. Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooooooooooo.

From what I can tell, We Had to Remove this Post is only categorized as horror in some places. I definitely felt a sense of dread while reading that I get from some horror I’ve read. The dread didn’t come from the graphic content Kayleigh had to moderate, but from witnessing the way she embraced the rules of content moderation and applied them to real life. I think you’re meant to start this book thinking you’re going to get a surface-level shock from some “Trigger Warning on The Internet” type stuff, but by the end, those things aren’t the most shocking parts of the book at all.