Kayleigh is finally telling her story about her dark time working as a content moderator for a giant unnamed tech corporation, and it's her job to watch any flagged videos and deem if they are worth staying on the platform or be taken down. During her job, under stressful conditions and not enough breaks, Kayleigh and her colleagues witness horrific acts and have to play 'gods' in a way when it comes to leaving these videos up or not - and if they make the wrong decision, their corporate bosses breathe down their neck. Kayleigh's work and personal life entangle as she starts dating her colleague Sigrid but soon what everyone is absorbing every day turn things ugly.

This book is really interesting on so many levels. The mental health and toil of real life content moderators were the inspiration behind this book, as the author writes within her acknowledgements and as someone who, while not a content moderator, has worked a job which meant I was often privy to some really horrific and disturbing online content, I definitely was able to relate to some of what Kayleigh and her colleagues were going through here. What's going on in this story definitely feels like a very much exaggerated form of the life of content moderations, I definitely don't think it's that far from the truth unfortunately. It's easy to see how the work and content being absorbed directly resulted in people drinking and smoking more heavily, and finding solace in each other. The mental health of content moderators, as well as that of online journalists, who are sitting at a desk in a safe part of the world but still bearing witness to terrible moments of war, cruelty or human depravity is one that we still have a lot to learn about and I think this is reflected within this book.

I thought it so interesting how we see Kyo and Sigrid begin to fall prey to some conspiracy beliefs from idea that the earth is flat, to Holocaust denial and this in a way reflects what one sees on all sorts of forums from Facebook to 4chan and how if people are absorbing enough information and opinions/ideas even if unintentional it may actually start shaping the way they are thinking.

I definitely think this book could have done with another chapter at least and while the ending was there for shock value, it did feel that little bit too abrupt for me and I felt unsatisfied.