We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets (2022, translated by Emma Rault) is a novella focused around the depravity of humanity through protagonist Kayleigh’s testimony to a lawyer about why she won’t testify in a lawsuit against her ex-employer, Hexa, a content moderation company. Through the course of the novella we learn of the sickening content she had to see as part of her job, and the interpersonal relationships, eventually conflicts, she had with her co-workers.
In theory the story Bervoets sets out is intriguing – we are led into the story knowing something happened to Kayleigh’s partner and co-worker, Sigrid, and for me the main motivation in continuing through the novella is finding out what exactly occurred (that and the fact that the novella was a suggested reading for one of my university classes).
Bervoets’s writing style is fluid and as a reader I was able to glide easily through her sentences while still finding them well-detailed, a good balance between contextualising without bogging down. They key strength I find in the story is the research Bervoets put into it – at the end of the novella she left a sources page for all the research she conducted to be able to understand what it means to work for a content moderation company, and in turn this means she was able to succinctly impart this information to us. There is a section early on detailing the training the Hexa employees have to undertake, how something can be morally wrong on many levels but only in one way that breaches a Terms of Service, and how something equally corrupt can be considered not in breach of the rules simply because it manages to skirt them and there is no flexibility in the guidelines set out.
Bervoets describes the whole situation with far more clarity than I do here, and that’s something I well appreciate. In a matter of pages she was able to describe the confusion of it all far better than I’d been able to comprehend it through previous research attempts of my own. Beyond this appreciation for her explanation of content moderation practises, though, I find much left to be desired.
The main problem is that there seems to be a split between two stories that Bervoets wants to tell. One is of the horrors one has to witness as a content moderator, a story to inform the reader of what exactly goes on in that world. The other is a story of interpersonal struggles, an at times unreliable narrator who casts the problem unto others until finally allowing some shred of truth at the last possible minute. Both of these stories are fine in theory, but blended together they don’t work. There is a disconnect between the two that makes it feel as if I’m holding a novella that’s taken pages from two manuscripts and taped them together somewhat haphazardly.
It could be that something is lost in translation, but I find it highly unlikely that would be such a persisting issue throughout the story. In discussing We Had to Remove This Post with peers it became clear that a lot of us had this issue of feeling that things didn’t quite line up like Bervoets had perhaps intended.
The other striking thing to me is how I was primed before reading. As mentioned earlier I was made aware of this novella as it was suggested reading for a class. Usually for any work of writing assigned or recommended we are given a synopsis of what the story is about. In the case of We Had to Remove This Post this synopsis was overshadowed by the content warning that came along with it for disturbing content. Maybe I’ve spent too much time unsupervised on the internet in my formative years and have become jaded, desensitised; the content warning felt far overhyped.
In my early teens I had a brief but intense interest in reading Creepypastas. While there were certainly great stories to come from that site in my memory they are overshadowed by the ones that became popular because we the readers were a cluster of edgy teens with little gauge of what made a good story, and so anything that carried shock or gore we thought fantastic simply because we’d never read such a thing before. Bervoets’s novella brings me back to that time. Through her work she describes many of the horrifying things the Hexa workers are subjected to seeing, but they have minimal to no impact on the story beyond their first being mentioned. They are simply there to shock.
This lack of impact I feel is the greatest weakness in the story. As the blurb describes it this is a job that breaks down the workers until they, too, become twisted. In practise a significant portion of the novella gives the impression that they simply see things and say “oh well” until the final quarter or so where many characters take a 180 on who they had been until that point. There is a lack of narrative justification for this development and it feels unearned.
Kayleigh is the only character we are able to gain some insight into the corruption of but even her changes are abrupt – she is an unreliable narrator speaking from a place of disconnect from the situation, so there is no opportunity for others to clarify when she is distorting the facts or hiding her transgressions. In this way her changes are unjustified too – they’re treated as more of a twist when given her position as the protagonist we should have been able to perceive at least a glimpse of that spiral, of the changes to her morals because of how the Hexa guidelines have blurred her understandings of right and wrong.
Ultimately, I’m let down by this novella. The concept carries so much potential but the execution fell flat. Perhaps if Bervoets had elected to flesh out the story to novel-length there would have been the space to address the issues I had with it, but as it stands it was a shock-value, surface-level piece that left little impression on me beyond being disappointed. I’m not against giving another work of Bervoets’s a chance in future, if any more are translated from Dutch, but We Had to Remove This Post just wasn’t it.
3/10