'The dank underside of social media, its cruelty and delusions . . . superbly poised, psychologically astute and subtle' - Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
'A glimpse of the foetid underbelly of the internet' - The Times
We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets is a chilling, powerful and gripping story about who or what determines our world view.
To be a content moderator is to see humanity at its worst ― but Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job working 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.
Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens. Yet Kayleigh is good at her job, and in her colleagues she finds a group of friends, even a new girlfriend ― and for the first time in her life, Kayleigh’s future seems bright.
But soon the job seems to change them all, shifting their worlds in alarming ways. How long before the moderators own morals bend and flex under the weight of what they see?
Examining the toxic world of content moderation, the novel forces us to ask: what is right? What is normal? And who gets to decide?
Translated from the original Dutch by Emma Rault.
'Taut as a thriller, sharp as a slug of ice-cold vodka' - Irish Times
'Fast paced and thrilling, violent and nightmarish' - Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
'An acid glimpse into a new form of labor existing today' - Ling Ma, author of Severance
Hanna Bervoets is one of the most acclaimed Dutch writers of her generation. She is the author of several novels in her home country of the Netherlands, and she has also written screenplays, plays, short stories, and essays. She is the recipient of many literary awards, including the prestigious Frans Kellendonk Prize for her entire body of work. She was a resident at Art Omi: Writers at Ledig House, New York, and currently works and lives in Amsterdam with her girlfriend and two guinea pigs. We Had to Remove This Post has been translated into thirteen languages and is her first book to be translated into English.
Emma Rault is a writer and a translator from German and Dutch. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, The Cut, the LA Review of Books, and on Sky News’ Morning Stories in the UK, among other outlets. She is the recipient of a 2019 Idyllwild Arts Fellowship for non-fiction.
Recent and forthcoming translations include Hanna Bervoets’ We Had to Remove This Post (Mariner/Picador, 2022), Edward van de Vendel’s The Days of Bluegrass Love (Levine Querido, 2022) Nina Polak’s The Dandy (Strangers Press, 2020) and Rudolph Herzog’s Ghosts of Berlin (Melville House, 2019). Shorter work has appeared in Literary Hub, Asymptote, no man’s land, ANMLY, New Books in German and elsewhere. She has received translation grants from the Dutch Literature Foundation and was one of the translators-in-residence at the 2019 Crossing Border Festival in The Hague. In 2017, she was awarded the GINT Translation Prize for translation from German into English.
Some of her previous homes have included the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, the upstairs of a bird-of-prey hospital in rural Cambridgeshire and a houseboat on the London canals. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
