Canaries in the digital coalmine

'We Had to Remove This Post' is a close study of fraying emotional lives in a pressure-cooker environment. (Representational image: Finn via Unsplash)

A popular radio program in America during the '30s and '40s featured a crime-fighting vigilante known as the Shadow. Each episode started with the now-iconic opening lines: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” In our time, the answer to that question could well be: social media content moderators.

The nature of the activity is itself a minefield. Tech companies frame their own rules, governments try to intercede, and all sides invoke free speech principles. Meanwhile, offensive posts multiply and in a new version of Gresham’s Law, bad information tends to drive out the good.

Despite advances in artificial intelligence (AI), people are still needed to ensure that posts don’t cross the line. The demand is so high that content moderation is now a global industry employing thousands all over the world. In Behind the Screen, ethnographer Sarah Roberts’ study of the profession, a picture emerges of contract workers on the front lines overwhelmed by the stress of confronting some of the worst deeds and words of other human beings.

The fallout of such work can be unnerving. In 2018, it was reported that a group of content moderators in the US hired by third-party companies was suing Facebook for not providing a safe work environment. They alleged that reviewing violent and graphic images had led them to develop PTSD. Facebook ultimately agreed to pay them $52 million.

Acclaimed Dutch author Hanna Bervoets’ new novel is about such canaries in the digital coalmine. This makes it quite unlike most other novels that deal with social media, such as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, which is about the impact on avid users, or Dave Eggers’ The Circle, about the machinations of company founders.

The Dutch title of Bervoets’ book is Wat Wij Zagen, which loosely means “what we saw”. In Emma Rault’s assured English translation, the title is the somewhat more topical We Had to Remove This Post.

This short, focused piece of fiction is a close study of fraying emotional lives in a pressure-cooker environment. It packs more compelling observation and detail into its pages than most novels twice the size.

The novel is framed as a testimony of sorts, a recollection by the twenty-something Kayleigh about the time she spent at Hexa, a content evaluation subcontractor for a large tech company. “What’s the worst thing you ever saw?” is a question she’s often asked. “People act like it’s a perfectly normal question,” she thinks, “but how normal is a question when you’re expecting the answer to be gruesome?”

At Hexa, she and her colleagues are hemmed in by accuracy scores, rising daily targets, and guidelines that are open to interpretation. Under poor working conditions, they have to review posts reported as offensive by users of the platform. In practice, this means spending all day watching horrific videos of, among other things, mutilated children, mistreated animals and people singing Hitler’s praises.

Step by step, Bervoets unpacks how the trauma and anxiety of such activity seeps into their lives. Kayleigh recalls a colleague who loses sleep because he is afraid that terrorists will kidnap him at night; another can’t handle loud noises, bright lights, or sudden movements; many flinch if anyone comes up behind them in the supermarket.

All of them start to drink more, sometimes during work. At one point, spotting a person appear on the roof of a building opposite the office, they feverishly speculate over whether he is going to jump, in the manner of some of the videos they have seen.

In time, this spills over into giving credence to absurd conspiracy theories. Some of them start to take seriously the outlandish views of those who believe the Earth is flat, or that George Soros is the head of a demonic cabal.

The novel gains emotional heft because Kayleigh’s story is essentially that of an intense affair with a co-worker. The woman she is attracted to is one who would rather be a nutritionist than spend her time observing the horrifying depths to which humanity can sink.

When cracks appear in the relationship, Kayleigh is distraught. Her subsequent actions reveal another layer to the novel, making one wonder how reliable a narrator she is and whether her work has affected her more than she thinks.

We Had to Remove This Post doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but raises uncomfortable questions that are as relevant to its characters as they are to readers. What causes the eruption of offensive content on social media, who stands to gain, and what is it doing to us? That is what stays with you after the last page.