In my mind, when writing We Had To Remove This Post, Hanna Bervoets had a critical choice to make. Providing real-world news stories in a bibliography, the novel is about the dark world of online content moderation and it seems to me the central question is how to grapple with the terrible, unrelenting barrage of awful content. It would be tempting to emulate a deluge of graphic horrors, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, but Bervoets resists the allure, favouring a minimalistic approach over the draw of maximalism.
In fact, the novel starts with a deconstruction of its own audience. The opening question is “So what kinds of things did you see?” (1) and the narrator, Kayleigh, criticizes the people in her life (a formerly estranged aunt, a new colleague, even her therapist) for prying into the horrors, continually wanting to know the most disturbing thing she ever saw. Everyone wants to know how dark it is in the depths, and I think Bervoets plays on the audience’s sadism. We, too, want to know how dark content moderation can get, and Bervoets’ minimalism seems to be an act of resistance. She will not feed the darkness within us.
The novel uses a framing device wherein Kayleigh addresses the reader directly. In turn, the reader is positioned as Mr. Stitic, a lawyer working on a class action lawsuit against Hexa, a thinly-veiled version of Facebook whose horrible working conditions sparked PTSD in a number of its former employees. Kayleigh passes information along tactfully to influence the case, remaining vague when possible. The framing device itself is clever because we are essentially placed in the role of judge—a content moderator of sorts—evaluating whether to admit Kayleigh’s testimony.
Kayleigh herself is an unreliable narrator of sorts. I won’t spoil the ending of this short novella, but there is a moment that calls into question the reliability of her account. There’s a moment where she is encouraged to record herself in an intimate act at work with her girlfriend. It’s posited as an erotic gesture which is later granted an entirely new significance, which is a clever twist. Even when the twist is revealed, it is understated: the key detail is implied but not replicated directly; Bervoets refuses to delve into the deepest horrors. The very end of the book continues in the minimalist vein. Kayleigh resorts to an ill-conceived plan with some horrific implications and, at the moment she realizes it, she asks herself, “What the hell am I doing?” (134). Finis.
Moments like that make me wonder whether maximalism would have been a better approach. The suggestion of the fallout is a cliffhanger to end on, but I would love to have read more. We don’t get quite enough information to decide Kayleigh’s fate—
—oh darn, that’s exactly like her role at Hexa. We’re placed in the same frustration the employees there have. The content moderators are given a Kafkaesque set of rules to follow. For instance, bodily harm is not allowed on the platform (unless for clearly comedic purposes), death and suicide are not allowed (but someone can leap from a window as long as you don’t see them hit the ground), you’re not allowed to hate protected groups, but you can phrase things to imply that terrorists are all Muslim because terrorists are not protected and being Muslim is not in itself an insult. You can’t threaten politicians but you can threaten public figures. At one point, the characters are forced to decide whether to leave a video up where a man is playing in bed with dead cats; the video doesn’t give definitive proof that they’re dead, but as content moderators they know that they had to take down footage of him killing them. You can see why these decisions get complex: their ever-changing 300 page rule book could use a flow chart.
Having to navigate these rules leads to some detrimental effects on the employees. In one gruelling scene, the moderation team sees someone (in real life) on the roof across from their complex. They watch while he contemplates the fatal jump. Kayleigh reads the situation as an act of content moderation: “In videos of this sort of thing you usually didn’t see the ground, in which case we could leave them up, but this wasn’t a stunt or a joke or some activist making a statement. We would definitely see blood and maybe even bits of his insides, so this isn’t allowed, I remember thinking” (46-47). The fact that events in the world “are not allowed” hints at a disturbing ineptitude; in fact, only one member of the moderation team goes to help the distressed man while the others are rendered paralyzed witnessing this “content”. The most cynical of the group even calls out for the man to jump. Then, someone says, “We have to do something” (47) and “although people immediately started murmuring in agreement, no one did anything” (47).
The callousness of the characters is replicated throughout the book. At a climactic moment in the text, several of the employees find themselves susceptible to flat Earth and Holocaust denial conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s a sign of how jaded our society is and the normalization of horrific content that these revelations seem almost quaint. Another example is that as Kayleigh becomes more desensitized, she starts exploring increasingly disturbing pornography. An interesting side effect here is that Kayleigh is routinely masculinized throughout the text. At least once she is referred to as “a gentleman” and several times her masturbation is referred to as “jerking off”, which I generally would associate with men. I suspect her alignment with masculinity is a commentary on the link between men and sexual violence.
Between all these moments, there seems to be an inherent love of transgression. When Hexa tells employees not to smoke, drink, or have sex on premises, those behaviours increase, Similarly, situations seem to escalate (cf. Kayleigh’s final excursion in the book), as though cultivated by content moderation. Being responsible for enforcing regulations only seems to increase the pleasure of their personal transgressions.
While the book is infused with social commentary, a surprising amount of the novel is rooted in the relationship between Kayleigh and her girlfriend. Their work lives fade into the background somewhat and a domestic novel comes to the fore, offering its own doubts and concerns (especially given that Kayleigh alludes to being too affectionate in a previous workplace—does that remind us of the man with two split videos of the cats? Do we see the second video, as it were, of Kayleigh’s narration, while the previous, more obviously objectionable content has been censored out?).
We Had To Remove This Post was, admittedly, not exactly what I expected. There were times I felt disappointed in how Bervoets delivered on the engaging premise it establishes. At the same time, though, I think this book could not have been written any other way to produce the same destabilizing effects. As much as we may thirst for disclosure, the quiet nuance of the novel allows us to maintain our humanity and allows us the space for the thoughtfulness such disturbing technological situations require.
If this post is itself not taken down, I wish you some happy reading, however dark it may be.
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