Billed as a cautionary tale of the dark recesses of social media, We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets is more about the emotionally fraught and often problematic relationships between young people thrust into an intense working environment.

In the novel, the working environment is the Facebook-knock off Hexa, where our main character Kayleigh has taken a job as a content moderator. Together with a gang of ethnically diverse but otherwise somewhat interchangeable friends, Kayleigh wades through the horrific content human beings generate and tries to assess it according to a long list of highly specific but often arbitrary rules.

Being subjected to child porn, animal cruelty, and Nazi propaganda every day takes a toll on the close-knit group. Kayleigh, already struggling with her mother’s death and her father’s abandonment, throws herself into a relationship with a colleague.

It is through that relationship that we discover that Kayleigh’s view point may not be as objective as she would like to believe.

The title, We Had to Remove This Post, is extremely catchy but the title in the original Dutch, Wat wij zagen or  ’What we saw’ is a much more accurate summation of the book. It plays on the literal subject matter (the images these people are forced to watch day in and day out) but also the deeper storyline (the unreliable narrator.)

The veneer of social media reads a bit like an episode of Dirty Jobs, the American reality television series in which host Mike Rowe tries out various gross but critical occupations from fuel tank cleaner to sheep castrator. You see the disgusting bits but neither work grapples with why this job is needed and how the conditions can (and should) be improved.

The depiction of the intense relationships that develop between emotionally immature young people thrown together by the coincidence of employer, however, is very well done. Kayleigh’s mistakes and misunderstandings in her romantic entanglements are common among those trying to mature and grow in the face of difficulty.

The framing of the book — Kayleigh is writing a letter to a lawyer working on a lawsuit against Hexa — is an unnecessary distraction. It fails to accomplish what it says it will, explaining why Kayleigh cannot participate in the lawsuit and adds an unneeded layer to the work.

We Had to Remove This Post is the seventh book by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets. Her previous works have taken home the Opzij Literature Prize, the JMA Biesheuvel Prize and the Frans Kellendonk Prize for her entire body of work. We Had to Remove This Post is her first book to be translated into English.

Don’t be misled by the English title. While questions are raised about social media, We Had to Remove This Post is really about relationships and the lies that we tell ourselves. It’s worth a read but needs a content warning.

You can get your copy at the American Book Center.