When I began reading Elaine Castillo’s Moderation, a new American novel about the psychological damage of online moderation, I had to pause. I’d read novels that confronted difficult material before, but this one blurred the line between bearing witness and re-enacting pain.
The book follows Girlie, a content moderator for a social media giant whose work requires her to watch and delete the internet’s most violent footage. Castillo threads this labour through a broader story of tech exploitation, immigration and the way empathy becomes a marketable skill.
