We Had To Remove This Post? More like We Need To Remove This Book From Every Shelf Ever Right Now.
Kayleigh needs money. She takes the job of a content moderator at an unnamed company, even though it is gruelling work. She has to review offensive videos, photos, rants and conspiracy theories and decide which can stay and which have to be taken down.
Kayleigh and her colleagues deal with horrors on their screen every day, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing rules and guidelines. Kayleigh is good at her job, and in her colleagues, she finds a group of friends.
But as time goes on, the job changes them little by little. They don’t notice it at first, but what happens when the moderators' own morals bend and flex under the weight of what they see?
We Had To Remove This Post had a very interesting premise. The beginning was promising and I was curious to find out more about Kayleigh’s new life as a content moderator at this unnamed company.
As the story progresses, we start losing the main focus. The story moves on from the main point of the book of the struggles of being a content moderator and delves into Kayleigh’s personal life and her relationships. It explores her past relationship with a toxic gold digger onto her current relationship with one of her colleagues. It was a weird cutaway and I had to re-read the blurb to make sure that I wasn’t being delusional.
To be honest, I had no clue what was happening in this book most of the time. It was confusing. There was a whole bunch of words on the page that basically said nothing.
By this point, I was on the verge of dropping this book.
It also did not help that I did not enjoy the way the book was written. It was put in a confession type of way where Kayleigh recounts her experience working as a content moderator to a Mr Stitick, a lawyer who won’t stop bothering her for information. We basically have no idea who this lawyer is, except that he is representing a company that is against the company that Kayleigh worked at. Honestly, his role was so minuscule, it didn’t even matter to the plot.
Speaking of characters, the people in this book were so boring. Not one of them was interesting. I couldn’t care less about Kayleigh when she was a content moderator or when her ex was treating her badly. Yes, that’s how much I connected with her.
The other characters weren’t any better. Kayleigh’s colleagues, later turned friends, use vulgar language as a humorous form of coping mechanism to deal with what they have to go through day-to-day. The jokes were not executed very well, and I thought it was a lame excuse to throw out every single offensive word ever known to man.
Then, the conclusion. Was it even a conclusion? It felt like Bervoets just decided she was going to stop writing and call it a novella. What even was that? I think it was supposed to be meant mysteriously but just ended up being more frustrating and confusing as a reader.
We Had To Remove This Post is an underwhelming piece of work that felt undone and incomplete. There were a few gory descriptions of violence, but it was not the shocking horror that I was expecting. It had a lot of potential to be good but just lacked the substance, details and time that was needed to make this a good read. It might've also been better if the blurb was not misleading.
This is my first two-star read of the year so to say I am disappointed would be an understatement.
If you prefer hearing me rant about this book in video form, watch my reading vlog. I also take you through my entire reading journey.
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Genre: Contemporary, psychological, political fiction
Series: Standalone
Number of pages: 138
Year published: 2021
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