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By: Hanna Bervoets

Narrated by: Khristine Hvam

For readers of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny or Ling Ma's Severance: a tight, propulsive, chilling novel by a rising international star about a group of young colleagues working as social media content monitors—reviewers of violent or illegal videos for an unnamed megacorporation—who convince themselves they’re in control . . . until the violence strikes closer to home.

Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments. Yet Kayleigh finds a group of friends, even a new love—and, somehow, the job starts to feel okay.

But when her colleagues begin to break down; when Sigrid, her new girlfriend, grows increasingly distant and fragile; when her friends start espousing the very conspiracy theories they’re meant to be evaluating; Kayleigh begins to wonder if the job may be too much for them. She’s still totally fine, though—or is she?

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

interesting n personal look into media moderation

For being such a short read, it was interesting. It left me thinking. I don’t think I'd recommend this book for just anyone but it have an audience.

Not sure if i’m missing something here

This book was captivating for the most part but it felt very unfinished by the time i got to the end. I didn’t feel like there was any conclusion whatsoever and I just wish there was more to it. Good concept thought. Narrator was good.

Great performance and story

The subject detail is very heavy and not particularly for the faint of heart. Very interesting for people into sick stuff and descriptions (it's not that bad but it depends who you are) the ending felt unfinished but overall really interesting story

Performance was great, story was bland

I’d been hyped for this book for months, but as my first Audible book I was very disappointed. While the subject matter and its implications seemed interesting, the author does not dwell on it much, instead setting the protagonist’s job aside to focus on the strange relationship with her girlfriend. The story introduces many loose threads that do not get tied up and ends in a very unsatisfying and strange way. You’d be better off reading editorials from real-life content moderators.

slow burn fizzled out

this novel felt like a slow burn in the beginning, like the story was building up to something bigger and then turned out to be nothing.
the lesbian relationship was a pleasant surprise at first but by the end just turned into something weird.