This work has wrought havoc on the mental health of her former colleagues, several of whom are bringing a joint lawsuit against the company: one is so paranoid he keeps a stun gun by the bed at night another “can’t handle loud noises, bright lights, or sudden movement in her peripheral vision”. Her role involved reviewing hundreds of problematic social media posts and deciding, by reference to a complex set of criteria, which ones to take down. Its young narrator, Kayleigh, has just quit her job as a content moderator with a fictitious big tech subsidiary called Hexa. We Had to Remove This Post, the seventh novel by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets and her first to be translated into English, is nothing if not timely. What counts as harmful content? Who gets to decide, and why? In an online world rife with offensive and potentially dangerous material – hate speech, harassment, misinformation, incitements to violence, accounts promoting self-harm and eating disorders – the problem of content moderation is becoming ever more vexed.

W hen he launched his takeover of Twitter earlier this year, Elon Musk sparked consternation by declaring he would loosen the social media platform’s content moderation policies – a move that could set Twitter on a collision course with the EU’s digital regulators.

We had to remove this post hanna